OT, had a little Comp panic.

Wow. I've sold heaps of them and I've yet to see one come back. What sort of failures?

Fraser

One just died totally, one lost everything, then died, and one has twice had some kind of major file structure collapse.

They were all replaced under the advance replacement system tho.

normally called something like system monitor or hardware monitor.

i've got maxtor in my system, seem good enough touch wood. although i got a samsung to upgrade my dad's digital terrestrial box from it's quite crap

the cat will learn trust me :)

Doesn't sound like they'd make very good heavies. heh.

Is that that thing where the data is copied to two drives at the same time for extra speed or summink? (*DO* know what I'm talking about).

I've got a WD 30-something or other GB drive as a boot drive, one of those 10K rpm ones. Pretty snappy compared to the last thing I had.

RAID. Raid 0 is drive mirroring and raid 1 is data striping. There is raid

Fraser

Depending on the Bios is can be anywhere "PC health" or cpu settings.

It's been a long time since I did this but RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks. The idea behind it was fault tolerance to begin with (it's a live backup) but you can run a small RAID array for faster access but at a big cost in reliability.

RAID 0 is a striped array (stripping is basically putting alternate sections of data on different drives) if any of the drives fail you lose all you information (this is about the fastest RAID available but is still only on average of 25-30% faster than a single drive when 2 drives are used). So with 2 drives you are twice as likely to suffer a catastrophic problem and gain 30%

RAID 1 is mirrored array (2 or more drives with identical data) no seek time improvements but if a drive fails you don't loose your data (no good for a virus or if it's told to delete a file still)

RAID 2 is known as ECC Bit striping and is virtually unused due to requiring a large number of drives (traditionally 14 or 39) and being generally headache inducing in complicity (even with 39 drives only 1 can fail and be recovered).

RAID 3 is Byte stripped quite fault tolerant but not that quick. (you effectively loose one drive to redundancy in this system)

RAID 4 is Block stripped Faster performance but not quite as easy to fix as RAID

RAID 5 is a good one it's also block level striped but the parity (error control) blocks are distributed rather than using a single drive that can slow things down (but the parity block is always stored on a drive independent of it's data)

RAID 6 is a variation on 5 but with twice the parity blocks making the system more fault tolerant (can have 2 dead drives not one and still run)

RAID 7 isn't part of the original RAID system and is a proprietary system biased around 3&4.

RAID 10 isn't actually 10 but 1&0 as the name suggests it's a combination of 1&0 basically it was an easy thing to add to RAID controllers as a marketing tool.

RAID 3-6 require a minimum of 3 drives and become more efficient with more drives.

RAID 0 is only used by people who absolutely *need* to have the very best benchmark scores possible. Personally I'd only look at using RAID 5 as it provides good speed with fault tolerance.

Very interesting, cheers.

Sign of a miss spent youth. Should have been going out, getting drunk and having fun.

Acronis True Image and drive director. A lot nicer than PM and Ghost.

I downloaded the 15 day trial of True image, haven't tried disk director=20 yet. I was happy to have one big partition on each drive and keep the=20 drive letters the same. 4 Physical HDDs, a DVD rom, DVD writer, and 2=20 virtual DVDs for mounting images is enough.

And now I'm back. Had to buy 3 "cheapies" from PC world Component shop (Samnsung ATA 133=20

Machine seems to fly now. Boots quicker, doesn't slug along, apps open=20 quickly and nothing has crashed yet.

--=20 Carl Robson Car PC Build starts again.

I could have RAIDed it, the motherboard has onboard RAID as well as standard drive sockets, and the add on PCI card does either standard drives or RAID. I just used standard drives. I replaced a 8+8+30 with 120+120+160. Already have another 120 in a removable caddy. Enough to be going on with. By the time I've filled that I will want another mobo/CPU anyway.

What have you tried ? I've had success with both

Heh - good luck with that :)

I've used about 20-ish 02OLO and 04OLO drives in the past 3 years, and around 90% of them have since died - and only two of those died within the

Suffice to say, I don't use Maxtor any more :) I've not had any failures since I switched to Seagate, and the 5-year warranty is a nice bonus.

If you're moving to rounded cables, be sure to buy the metal braided variety. They're subject to all sorts of extra interference by not carrying the grounding lines adjacent to the data lines - I've had issues with cheapy rounded cables in the past. Go for something like

Bulldog 4meg+ ADSL Lots of downloads. I like to play with video conversion and editing too.