I give up on RAID 0

I just finished wiping things clean and reinstalling XP for about the 4th time in as many weeks. The system has been completely stable per Prime95, but it seems all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, I would reboot and my OS would be trashed, i.e. missing or corrupt files.

This weekend though, my two 1 month old 30GB/7200/ATA100 Maxtors got totally trashed and could not be formatted. XP as well as fdisk reported hard drive failures while attempting to format. I went out and bought one 40GB Maxtor yesterday and gave up on RAID. I am not too disapponted, because I would have gotten the RAID versions anyway just for the added IDE chains.

It could have been heat I guess, but I thought that modern hhd's run cool. I have a jam packed case and had the RAID 0 drives on top of each other, actually touching.

Anyone have any comments or similar experiences? Time to RMA $200 worth of drives back to Maxtor. I wonder if they will give me one 60GB for the two 30GB dead ones?

LJ

Heat is the worst thing in the world for your components, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was the cause of the failures.

I have a SCSI 10K RPM 6 disk array on a backplane. I had to make an array cage for it, complete w/ a fan to keep them suckers cool - however....the fan went bad once....and I couldn't even TOUCH the drives.

Anyhow, I digress - heh

Find someway to keep cooling on your hard drives and you should get a longer life out of them.

Goood luck!

those drives are also crap. i sold mine 4 20$, the new maxtors are good, but that one sucks. it started making little clicks and would corrupt the os anything past 145fsb
just my .02$
-Malakai

Thanks all. Just curious, how do you know my 30GB drives are (were) total crap? There are so many models Maxtor offers.

I will say this, the 2 30GB drives were Quantum drives in Maxtor boxes. They also looked like drives from a year ago - aluminum casing and big. The newer Maxtor drives are slimmer and mostly black. The 40GB drive I bought in a panic and slapped in yesterday was a newer slim ATA133 drive.

On a side note, you gotta love Staples.com. I bought these drives on 1/28/02 and figured I'd see what they could do before I RMA'd them back to Maxtor and ended up with 2 30GB drives I don't need.

They are sending someone out today to pick them up for a full credit. Takes the pain away from overpaying for the 40GB ($125) yesterday.

Seems very odd that both harddrives failed at the same time. You have tried fdisking and reformatting both drives, right? I have no idea if they died due to excessive heat, but I do know those 7,200 RPM drives do get a bit warm. I have a fan mounted in front of my harddrive cage that pulls fresh air in from the front of the case and blows it across both drives. I allow as big of a space in between my drives as possible. I dunno, having them touching don't sound all that wise to me. Maybe time to get a bigger case?

I tried everything to get these puppies going. I tried formatting them in RAID 0, as well as individually. I tried QuicK NTFS, NTFS, Quick FAT, FAT and also tried the Win98 book disk and fdisk. No luck.

I think it had to be heat. I would love a full tower, but aesthetically, it wouldn't work well:

If you purchased them retail they should have came with a floppy disk. On that disk you would have found a utility to do a low level format, as well as test the drives out. I happen to like maxtor drives alot and have had good luck with them. however I have had problems with formats that even fdisk wouldn't fix so I would do a low level format which puts the disk in a like new state, and I was able to format the drives after!!!!!

Doing a low level format has to be the last option, as when you do a low level format the drive is NEVER the same again, as when they do a low level format at the factory they are done a special way & when u do it u loose speed amongst other probs, you should only do a low level format if your drives are out of warranty as then it doesn't really matter. for more info on this check one of the hd manufactures web site.

I did try a low level format.

"Low level formats" as alot of people know it to be called are no longer "life threatening" to a drive.....low level formatting is not what it used to be.....on older ide drives...it did indeed re-initialize the drive on the low level...which could have caused all sorts of major problems..( like setting the drive up wrong....wrong settings on interleave...how many sectors per track...etc etc etc...) but todays drives can't be "low level formatted"...this can be done ONLY at the factory.....what really is being done when using a utility today from a drive manufacturer is the writing of all zeros "0" to the drive, it's a step above the factory low level format, all it does is completely wipe out every trace of data on the drive..( partition..boot sector...bad clusters..etc etc etc...) it doesn't "change" the drive at all, just gives it a fresh start..( best way to wipe out a stuborn boot sector virus too..) In any case...todays "low level format" is completely safe and has no ill effects whatsoever on a drive....not like the old school LLF's.....they could kill drives....

additionally...todays LLF is called "zero-fill"...because thats all it does, write 0's to the drive.