Originally posted by cincyrob:

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ok guys question.
ive changed around my hdd. my 250gb now has my OS on it. but it still has the old drive letter(E) i want to change it to (C) but it wont let me. am i going to have to unplug the actual drive that has the letter C then restart with the it unpluged to let the 250gb drive take it??

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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BTW, you have to be careful when changing the boot drive, at least with Win7, because it sees the old boot drive as C, and it will format both drives simultaneously if you are not careful. Now all I hook up is the drive I want to use, and then when finished unplug the opticals, plug in the HDDs one at a time and re-boot. I then plug in the opticals to get the Drive letters right. You can change the drive letters on all but bootable drives, but that's fraught with it's own problems changing the letters.

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Originally posted by creaky:

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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BTW, you have to be careful when changing the boot drive, at least with Win7, because it sees the old boot drive as C, and it will format both drives simultaneously if you are not careful. Now all I hook up is the drive I want to use, and then when finished unplug the opticals, plug in the HDDs one at a time and re-boot. I then plug in the opticals to get the Drive letters right. You can change the drive letters on all but bootable drives, but that's fraught with it's own problems changing the letters.

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Yeah i'd noticed that about Win7. My Win7 machine is a triple boot, (Win7, XP and Puppy Linux), and XP has always been the C drive. Win7 is the secondary boot and has this wierd and wonderful C/D drive switching going on, so i can happily copy stuff to and from the XP drive as it's known as D within Win7 and booting into XP sees XP as the C drive like it always was. Though somewhere within Win7 it obviously knows that XP is the real C drive. Can't remember if i'd seen this behaviour on other Windows Oses and not really fussed in researching it further as i have no need to mess with anything, but i guess it only matters if you manually try to switch letters around.

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Originally posted by cincyrob:

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WOW... i understand what your saying creaky. but it stil has my head shaking just thiinking of what you said.....lol or is that the budweisers that has my head shaking????;lol

i do have a bad hdd. my 250gb i took to work today and gave to our IT guy, he installed windows 2008 server on it. and had issues with it. like with my xp pro it looked like it booted in safe mode. all grey.... gonna deal with seagate in the morning about a rma... it is one of the drives with a 5 year wrty..... ive only had it a little over a year.

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Quote:

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i heard shelf life is 3 years for hard drives with a Os on it that as far as I go after that it's turned into back up storage drive.[/i

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Originally posted by Estuansis:

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AFAIK, older LCD monitors weren't very dependable and I've seen a lot of dead ones come into where I work. A few just have dead backlights and can be fixed, but most are burnt out or need a new LCD. Remember Russ has had to have his older 20.1" Sceptre re-built. Whereas my 2407WFP still functions and looks like new.

Most newer LCDs are infinitely better built. The technology has advanced quite a bit and the rock bottom image quality for LCDs has risen greatly. Even the cheapest ones are better than they were 3-4 years ago.

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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I also don't ever turn off my hard drives! It's been my experience that setting the drives to never turn off, makes them last longer, since shutting down and restarting them is harder on the drives than just letting them run. It makes sense to me as every time you shut off a drive, the heads park, and when you start it up again, they have to un-park. Lots of mechanical wear there.

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Originally posted by creaky:

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Originally posted by theonejrs:

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I also don't ever turn off my hard drives! It's been my experience that setting the drives to never turn off, makes them last longer, since shutting down and restarting them is harder on the drives than just letting them run. It makes sense to me as every time you shut off a drive, the heads park, and when you start it up again, they have to un-park. Lots of mechanical wear there.

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My experience is that hard drives aren't meant to be up and spinning over more than a few years if used 24/7 as the bearings wear out or something like that (i've seen it happen many times, especially in Enterprise systems where i've had the joy of recovering from said failures), my most extreme example was where a server had an uptime of a few days shy of 3 years, it had drives both internally and in an external array; for the first reboots after those 3 years about half a dozen drives died, you could hear the pain the bearings were in, the drives weren't happy being made to crank up after never being shutdown; luckily we were able to reconstruct enough of the data after replacing those drives.
However for general home use i guess there's not really much difference in whether hard drives are used constantly if said PC is left on for days/weeks at a time, just not years at a time.
I keep my torrent machine on 24/7, it's up and running for weeks/months at a time. but every now and then i power down for a little while then restart to allow the hard drive's bearings a little exercise.

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Quote:

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theonejrs
Modern Hard Drives use FDB, Fluid Dynamic Bearings of some sort or Brand name. Perfect, given the working environment, but they have almost no tolerance for torque loads. Vibration induces Torque Loads! Older 500GB drives were not the smoothest running drives and many were prone to vibration. Not a good thing for any high speed drive, or it's longevity! That's why there were so many HDD failures when 500GB drives first came out! Balancing methods have continued to improve, so today precision Static and Dynamic balancing is possible to a degree not viable just a few years ago. That technology is what made 1TB and larger drives possible. A few years back, Static balancing was abandoned, as the thinking was that Dynamic balance is better. It is, but if you balance the rotating mass by static balancing, and then apply Dynamic balancing to it, the vibration levels are much lower. Much like balancing car tires Today, Low rotation Static balance and high speed Dynamic balancing and the result is far superior to older methods.

Today, I check every HDD I install by holding it in my hand. Any vibration or whine at all, and it goes back! I don't want to feel it or hear it! I learned all of this through my work. I deal with ball bearings that have to survive running at 400,000-450,000 RPM, and not exceed 70 decibels doing it. Much smaller scale than a hard drive, but the principals still apply!

Best Regards,
Russ

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Originally posted by bigwill68:

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Quote:

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theonejrs
Modern Hard Drives use FDB, Fluid Dynamic Bearings of some sort or Brand name. Perfect, given the working environment, but they have almost no tolerance for torque loads. Vibration induces Torque Loads! Older 500GB drives were not the smoothest running drives and many were prone to vibration. Not a good thing for any high speed drive, or it's longevity! That's why there were so many HDD failures when 500GB drives first came out! Balancing methods have continued to improve, so today precision Static and Dynamic balancing is possible to a degree not viable just a few years ago. That technology is what made 1TB and larger drives possible. A few years back, Static balancing was abandoned, as the thinking was that Dynamic balance is better. It is, but if you balance the rotating mass by static balancing, and then apply Dynamic balancing to it, the vibration levels are much lower. Much like balancing car tires Today, Low rotation Static balance and high speed Dynamic balancing and the result is far superior to older methods.

Today, I check every HDD I install by holding it in my hand. Any vibration or whine at all, and it goes back! I don't want to feel it or hear it! I learned all of this through my work. I deal with ball bearings that have to survive running at 400,000-450,000 RPM, and not exceed 70 decibels doing it. Much smaller scale than a hard drive, but the principals still apply!

Best Regards,
Russ

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Russ you got me really interested in the proper use of a hard drive of how they should be installed and properly mounted in a case here's a few things that seagate bought to my attenetion to mention on the aspected of FDB

Fluid dynamic bearing motors utilize a viscous oil or air rather than metal ball bearings, and are superior to conventional ball-bearing motors in several distinct ways:

Lower Nonrepeatable Runout

Ball bearing motors typically use between 8 and 12 metal balls. Any imperfections in the balls' roundness or in the raceways in which the balls roll can cause higher nonrepeatable runout when the motor rotates. This severely limits the tracks per inch (TPI) on the disc and consequently reduces the disc drive capacity.

Shock Performance

In a fluid dynamic bearing motor, the working parts of the motor are separated by a film of oil, which acts like a shock absorber and prevents damage to the bearing surfaces. While typical ball bearing motors can withstand up to 150 Gs of shock, fluid dynamic bearing motors have been tested up to 1,200 Gs.

Acoustic Performance

As drive spindle speed continues to increase, noise from the contact of the ball bearings in the raceway increases. Fluid dynamic bearings produce very little noise because they have no metal-to-metal contact.

(Fatigue Life) most important part

Fatigue life is the calculated number of hours the motor can survive before metal fatigue, from the constant rolling of the balls over the raceway, causes the bearings to fail. With no metal-to-metal contact, fluid bearing motors have, theoretically, an infinite fatigue-life.

Vibration (Russ's hand Test)


A well-designed fluid bearing can quickly dampen any oscillation generated externally or internally. Dampening in bearings is important for a disc drive to correctly write to or retrieve the data from the disc


in question Russ is it or is it not very important how we install a OS on these hard drive in horizontal(level) or vertical (upright) position in my times with working computers..I found it to be more problems with systems that has vertical hard drives installed they they work harder in that way than bein flat and there's a lot of needle jumping and more hard drive crashings..I don't know I just fill a hard drives should be flat mounted with all four screws and balanced out in a case and dampen...Now your gonna have me do vibration checks on every drive I get from now on good ideal...lol

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