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Hard drive danger


johntee

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I may be popping into this thread a little too late, but I do have a suggestion.

It might help to have a dedicated internal or external torrent drive (or just a data drive) and use your manufacturer's "acoustic managment" utility (I know this exists for Maxtors, might need to use Ultimate Boot CD for them and other MFGs) to set your drive to Quiet mode. Under Quiet mode, it places much less priority on "getting there fast" and more on "using less power" -> less noise -> less heat -> LESS WEAR. Since torrenting is far from time-sensitive, it certainly wouldn't hurt. And since it's not a program or operating system drive, the slower speed won't affect your normal computer operation either.

Now, if I could just find a way to run that on my 100gb 2.5" external USB HDD...

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Maxtor FTW

Ah ha ha ha.

We used to get Maxtor DiamondMAX 8 HDDs in the OEM PCs at work. We noticed a whole lot of them seemed to fail. When we did some checking on the inventory numbers, the HDD were failing at a rate of 10% in the first six months and nearly 25% at 1 year (of roughly 400 PCs). I did some research, and it turns out that this model of Maxtor HDD has a defect that causes it to corrupt it's own firmware. Yet Maxtor kept manufacturing them and selling them.

WD or Seagate for me, thanks. I'd go with anything short of a Bigfoot drive than buy another Maxtor.

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I wouldn't trust a WD as far as I can throw it. WDs are the ones that corrupt their own firmware or whatever - I've got 3 or 4 dead WDs (out of maybe 5 or 6) that either completely won't even try spinning up, or when they do, they report ridiculous models and parameters.

As far as Maxtor goes, I've got a 286 with a 120mb Maxtor drive that still has zero bad sectors, and my desktop's data drive is a 4 or 5 year old Maxtor 60gb drive. My desktop's main drive is a Maxtor 80gb drive. My server runs on a 40gb Maxtor drive (with a secondary 60gb WD drive I still don't trust), and my temporary DVD images are stored on a 60gb WD in a USB case.

More WDs have failed than I care to even count. Maxtors? A very rare sight. But many people have reversed and shuffled experience with these drives... I don't know what's with the variation. Sometimes I think it doesn't come down to brand at all. It could just be the nature of a hard drive. Who the heck knows? All I know is I've had extremely great luck with Maxtor drives, and absolute nil luck with WDs...

So... meh. :lol:

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Holy shit, 300gb? Good god. And I thought my 100gb, uhm... *looks up model string* Fujitsu 2.5" drive was big. Well, actually, it is... it's my biggest hard drive, so that's gotta count for something. Nice to have another Maxtor fan around, though ;)

But what's NCQ?

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  • 3 weeks later...

In the last month utorrent has been thrashing my HDD. The drive will eventually stall and hang the whole system.

I then tried azureus on the same download and all is fine.

Its a 2 year old 160 gig WD

It runs fine.

So the download on utorrent would go to 50k (on a 512adsl connection) and then after say 30 seconds the HDD light would come on permanently, utorrent download would reduce to zero (slowly) and then the system would eventually hang. Has happened each time I use utorrent now. So went to azureus (had it already installed) and so far no HDD issues.

Is it the HDD or utorrent?

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