2 hard drives in 2 years...

nester · 07-26-2001, 09:46 PM

Well,

I'm now offically in the market for a Laptop hard drive. My second drive since june or july of 1999 has come to it's death.

The first drive, a Fujitsu 8.4 gig took a year and about 10 months to die.. It's been replaced and installed in another system.

The second drive, a 30 gig Maxtor only lasted for 2 months in the car.. It had lived in a server for a year prior to becoming mobile.. It's soon to be sent back for repair..

So what notebook drives are good? I was thinking IBM.. I can't seem to find a place that sells both the 3.5 to 2.5 adapter and the drives in the same place.. *sigh*

Arby · 07-26-2001, 10:56 PM

Watch eBay... I found a new 30GB toshiba laptop drive for $200. They retail for about $350

www.compgeeks.com has the adapter for $3.95 and I think $2 shipping.

nester · 07-26-2001, 11:03 PM

yeah i saw that.. actually.. all the 30g drives on pricewatch are about 200..

with the 20 going for ~110.. i think i'm going to go 20 gig...

jshrieve · 07-27-2001, 09:32 AM

I've been using an IBM travelstar 20GB laptop drive for a few months and it's been good to me.

S.M.A.R.T. monitoring says it's quite healthy.

I don't have any special mounting for it. It's just velcroed onto the floor of the trunk so that it doesn't slide around. My suspension is relatively soft, but not floaty.

nester · 07-27-2001, 10:28 AM

well that was the bad part.. SMART on boot said everything was cool.. but when i hooked the drive up last night (after it stopped booting correctly) and ran Maxtor's power diag tools, it ran the 90 second smart test and it failed..

I actually got all the MP3's off the drive.. I was amazed. However the partition with all the useful information (config files, etc) were gone... these are the bends.. I've got an advance RMA coming from maxtor, and i'm on the search for a new drive. we shall see.

Aaron Cake · 07-27-2001, 10:45 AM

I have had no problems with my Fujitsu 6.4Gig drive. Startech.com sells the adapters for around $10.

PaulzY · 07-28-2001, 06:19 AM

lucky u didnt loose your mp3 collection, id die if i lost mine, i gotta back em up one day/weeek/month

nester · 07-28-2001, 11:59 PM

Well I actually considered starting clean.. and I may still do it.. I have 90% of the music on my workstation.. this way i start off fresh.. weed out some of the old stuff.

cenwesi · 07-29-2001, 12:07 AM

If mounted properly, NO HD should go back unless it is defective. Take it from me, if you do it correctly, it wont die.

nester · 07-29-2001, 01:54 AM

define mounted correctly.

jshrieve · 07-29-2001, 04:40 AM

I'm getting pretty ****ed.

I've had no HD or CPU problems. But first I had a BookPC which arrived with busted ethernet. I exchanged it. Got it back and it worked great for a while, then the tv-out died without explanation or warning but it worked fine otherwise.

So I got an MS-6215. Works great for a month. Now windows gives serious msgrvfr rundll32 etc errors, and suggests I reinstall.
Reformatting and reinstalling gives the same errors so it can't even do post-install setup.

Disabling all onboard components that I can, same result.

Really friggin tired of this.

If I were just doing mp3s, at this point I'd just buy a damn empeg or something rather than dealing with flaky solid state circuitry. But I like CoPilot 2001 and haven't seen anything else, that's third party (i.e. doesn't come with car) that compares and I don't want to give it up.

Argh.
If I have to build a new system, I think it'll be with a fullsize mobo, and PCI cards for everything.

I'm SICK of this crap.

nester · 07-29-2001, 11:54 AM

Despite the size issues, I have to agree that cards and non intergrated motherboards are the way to go, after my bookpc fiasco.

jshrieve · 07-30-2001, 03:13 AM

Alright, I found the problem. It was a DIMM starting to go bad.

The DIMM used to be fine, I had made sure to reseat it in case it came lose.

But it's behavior indicated some other problem, as it would always fail while probing for devices.

But I tried installing Win2k and got a data corruption error on loading the setup program for Win2k, and then at a different point next try. The change in the times it happened and that it happened when so little of the machine was being used (no device probing being done), made me try putting in a new DIMM..

and now it works

*sigh*

nester · 07-30-2001, 11:12 AM

At least memory is cheap.

Aaron Cake · 07-30-2001, 11:34 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Charles Enwesi:
<STRONG>If mounted properly, NO HD should go back unless it is defective. Take it from me, if you do it correctly, it wont die.</STRONG>

Then why have I had to replace 2 HDs before I got my laptop HD? Of course, I am assuming I mounted in correctly...

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