[mythtv-users] Booohooohoooo......

Roger Heflin rogerheflin at gmail.com
Sat Jul 12 22:54:01 UTC 2008


Brian Wood wrote:
> On Saturday 12 July 2008 15:48:22 Francesco Peeters wrote:
>> Nick Morrott wrote:
>>> 2008/7/12 Francesco Peeters <francesco at fampeeters.com>:
>>>> My USB harddisk on which my MythTV FE/BE lives died... The drive won't
>>>> spin up anymore, and I currently don't have time to rebuilt on a new
>>>> device, and I really don't want to either, because I meant to make that
>>>> machine a net-boot machine...  *rolls eyes*
>>>>
>>>> Why does shit like that always happen at the most inconvenient times...
>>>>
>>>> Only good bit is that this drive is less than 2 years old, so I will at
>>>> least get a new one from WD!...
>>> Sorry to hear about the failure. I often wonder whether external
>>> drives have adequate cooling and ventilation, especially when they are
>>> used heavily. Do/did you monitor your HDD temps via SMART? Was the
>>> external drive purchased as a single unit (drive plus enclosure) or
>>> did you purchase the two separately?
>> I wondered too, but it was a complete unit by WD, so I assumed they had
>> done at least some testing on that!  ;-)
>>
>> I did not continuously monitor the temps, but whenever I did, they
>> weren't outlandish high (iirc approx 45-47°C) though...
>>
>> All it does now is make short buzz sounds (approx .5 secs every 2 secs),
>> which sounds like it tries to spin up, but somethings keeping it from
>> doing so...
>>
>> Even allowing it to cool down for a day didn't help... Maybe I'll put it
>> in a bag and toss it in the freezer for a few hours to see if that makes
>> a bit of a difference...
> 
> I have had some luck with twisting the drive on its axis by hand, turn your 
> hand in the same plane the platters spin in. The idea is to overcome the 
> starting friction of the platters, the rolling friction is far less.

And plug it into power quickly after doing that, I have also had it work a fair 
number of times, once you get it going, get the data to someplace else and RMA 
it, sometimes you can do this procedure many times and sometimes only a few 
times (depending on what the actual failure is).

Is that drive a 2.5 or a 3.5?

> 
> I have also seen more trouble with external units than with internal ones. I 
> have often wondered if they intentionally put crappier drives in the external 
> units, but I guess that's just my paranoia creeping in.
> 

Brian,

2.5 or 3.5 on the external drives?  If they don't have external power they are 
almost always 2.5, and I have had a lot more trouble with 2.5's probably 
something to do with making everything small and low power makes things not 
strong enough to spin things up when the mess up the bearings in some way.

                           Roger


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