> >I have two seperate questions, the first may relate to Ronn's problems. > >1. Over the last year my niece and nephew have gone through four hard > >drives. These were name brand, WD, store bought hard drives. Two of the > >failures were instantanious, two built up over weeks until it was obvious > >that something was wrong. Is there any notices about hard drive failures? > >The real question: what do you experts do to look ahead for problems? I know > >I can't get teenagers to do any weekly checks, but could these problems been > >avoided? > > > You would have top assume something else is wrong here. Backups, RAID, > SMART etc are all available to protect your data in various ways, but > none of them is going to stop the hardware failure. I would be looking > at either the IDE controller (which these days means the whole > motherboard), or the power supply. Power supply is easiest (and > cheapest) 'coz you can simply swap them with another by removing 3 or 4 > screws while you get a repair store to test the output on both 12v and > 5v lines of the original unit. Any fluctuation is bad... > > Cheers > > Russell C.
Um, what? You didn't know this before but the four hard drive failures have been across three computers and motherboards. And it's not AC line voltage, for other reasons. I've never seen a power supply screwed into a case, only rivited. Which sucks. Kevin T. Sorry about the tone, I don't mean any.
