OT: PC problem for someone to help me with.

Have you tried the HD on one of the other PCs? Or plugging the mouse directly into the PC via a spare USB port?

If I remove the mouse from the KVM, I find that all of the PCs freeze (like a pulling the mouse from a live single PC) and won't accept a PS2 input until I reboot with the mouse either in the PC or in the KVM and all the PCs started at the same time.

Haven't tried the drive in another pc because the best machine to use it on is the machine I use as my web server/mail server and want that with as much uptime as possible.

Ignoring the mouse (DO NOT UNPLUG PS2 DEVICES WITH POWER ON! You *will* eventually destroy the PS2 controller...) this sounds like you've a USB HDD caddy that's asking too much of the power supply on the USB lines. I'd suggest trying connecting via a *powered* USB hub to see if this is the problem. There's only so much power you can pull out of a USB port, and whilst in theory the USB standard defines this and so all USB-certed hardware should be OK, it doesn't work like that in practice. Ric

Check in the CMOS setup for these options:

Recognise USB Mass Storage at boot USB Legacy Support

Try turning them off (or on) and see if it makes a difference.

I'm assuming you're sharing the USB drive and this is the share you lose - that's normal behaviour, you cannot share a drive that is not present. What you can do (assuming it's NTFS and part of an NTFS based system) is mount it as a subfolder of another folder on a permanent drive and share the parent folder, it will then appear and disappear as it is connected and the parent folder will remain shared. Sharing removable drive units is bad practice.

It has it's own PSU, 12v for the HDD, 5v for the USB interface internally.

Take the HDD out and shove it on an IDE channel. Flog the USB case. Most USB cases don't spin the drive down so they die in a hurry.

eh?

Drives are designed for continuous use, so as long as there's adequate cooling there should be no problem with that.

I find spinning drives up and down a lot causes more problems than letting them spin all the time.

Talking of USB hard drives - I've got one of those Lacie (designed by FA Porsche) 250GB USB2 drives, which hasn't yet given me any problems. My PC's on most of the time, as is that hard drive obviously, but I've got a couple of questions:

1. This spinning down malarkey - obviously if I want to take the drive to put in another machine elsewhere - how does it go about spinning down - does it happen automatically when I turn it off at the back?
2. How does it go about parking the drive heads, or is this an unneccessary worry in this day and age? AFAIK all Windows versions from

95 onwards parked the drive heads as part of the shutting down process, but what about an external USB drive - would it be a bad idea to just turn it off, pick it up and go with it?

Cheers,

Peter

You need to go through the safely remove hardware that you will find in the notifications section down by the clock that will flush any cached writes to the disk park the heads and normally spin it down. Then you can filch the switch on the back left and take it with you. (It will probably be listed as something like WDC WD2500***-****** as IIRC it's a Western Digital drive in most of the Lacie range)

I would have, but all onboard channels, + 2 of the channels on the ATA133 expansion card are taken up. All the HDD cage mounts, + one caddy in a 5" bay are full too. I love storage. Next time I replace the drives, they will probably be

500gig plus ones. that will give me over 2terrabytes real formatted space. I used to dream of such luxury.

Cheers Tim, I'll check that out next time I need to reboot. Although I might be rebuilding before that comes up. Can't decide between an AM2 X2 4200+, or a core due for a performance rig, or go for a socket 939 X2 3800 or 4000 for cheapness. Probably be looking at a Ge-force 7900 with either 256 or 512 ram, and 2 gig ram.

HDD's good, Tagen PSU excellent, monitor average (go TFT later maybe, but cheap Elonex 17" CRT is good enough), but my full tower beige case is looking shabby so I might look for a decent large midi/full tower in aluminium with more then the normal 3 3.5" hidden bays.

I can highly recommend Thermaltake Cases. VERY solid with good airflow.

That's what I'm looking for this time. Might go for a clone copy than a genuine thermaltake, but something along that type. Would love one of those mini server cubes for storage or a Lian-Li but can't afford.

I've got a Thermaltake Tsunami Dream -

See

They're also available in silver, and with or without window as shown here - I really can't fault anything about the design.

Actually, may need to bid on this

replace my old network server with shove two of the fastest P3 chips that it will take in, instead of the single P3 1GHZ that is in there now.although this might be over the top.http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290006572563

Then Thermaltakes are OK looking. If it has illumination fine, if not, not bothered

Antec Sonata II, Antec P150. Solid, good airflow, quiet.

Another for me to check out.