High FSB fries the drives?

[dgk]

There was a thread on another forum asking about overclocking the disk drives. The replies were not encouraging.

One reply mentioned that running drives faster than 33 was likely to screw the drives up. Since the only way to OC a pentium is to bump the FSB, how do you keep the drives from burning out or corrupting at higher bus speeds. My 450 P3 is running around 500, which means my bus is running 10% over spec. More or less.

I guess that means I should run frequent backups?

[DaveB]

The high FSB will not "fry your drives". Some older 5400 rpm drives can't handle an out-of-spec PCI clock along with DMA. They will not fry, but will corrupt your data. You can get it back with scandisk through a long and laborious process. I had to do that with a Fujitsu 5400 rpm drive that couldn't handle a 41.5 MHz PCI rate. Similary, a Maxtor 5400 rpm drive corrupted, but not as badly.

On the other hand, I had a Western Digital 5400 rpm drive that ran fine at 41.5 MHz for well over a year. And my new Maxtor 7200 rpm ATA66 drive has no problems at 39 MHz.

So, it all depends on the hard drive. It won't "fry", but it might corrupt your data. But if it doesn't do that right away, it'll be fine.

[Phil]

at a 112mhz fsb you will be fine I haven't seen a hard drive that won't handle that yet, it's only when you move up to 124mhz fsb that some drives become a problem, and that mesn they just won't boot I doubt any damage could be done to them, just make sure you don't stack multiple drives next to each over becasue the heat can really build up

[warduck]

ya need get to work on kicking that 450 , it might just do 630 or 640 mhz with just an alpha. Mine did.

warduck

[dgk]

The Pentium used to be my main computer but now is dedicated to dealing with audio tracks and burning disks for tape trees. I really don't want it running too over spec because any errors on the burning will come back to haunt. Those tape traders are nuts about any digital noise!

I did get a globalwin for it at the last local PC fair. Thank overclockers.com for the article on removing the original fan and sink!!! I NEVER would have figured out what to do without it.

I might bump it a little higher but don't really see the need.

Now my main machine (Asus A7V TB900) is running at 1010 and is just waiting for a better hsf. I have the super (****ty) orb and am thinking of going Alpha PEP66 with the papst 33 fan. If I can ever find a papst 33 fan, that is. I mostly do programming on it, which doesn't need OC. But I also play games, and it is pretty neat for that purpose!

Hmm. 633 you say...

[batboy]

I have an ATA33 Maxtor 13 gig 5,400 rpm harddrive and an ATA100 Maxtor 40 gig 7,200 rpm harddrive. Both spin happily at fsb of 112 and 115 MHz. But after a couple of failed attempts at overclocking to 120 MHz, my 40 gig fast Maxtor scrambled itself. Lost all the data on it, but after fdisk and reformatting, it's been ok ever since. My slow but trusty 13 gig Maxtor has been through about 2 years of O/Cing he!! now. I disable my 40 gig drive now, when I do extreme overclocking and learned it's cheap to burn CD backups of critical data. I'm looking at buying a 45 gig IBM, those 7,200 rpm drives are awesome, fast, and easily withstand the rigors of overclocking.

[[OC]_SR20DE]

Frying Tape drives or Disk drives are impossible at any overclocked bus speeds. I have mine running at 152mhz bus and my hard drive, baracudda, used to have some registry corrupt before... but after some time of use.. and burn in, everything is running smoother very happily and I very seldom get registry corrupt. My registry back up saves my ass anyways, heh....