i wanna know

[SIRCOOKS]

i wanna know if any of you guys have a 200 or 250 gb hds, reason being i have had alot of them but to my experince they tend to fail, is there something i should constantly do to maintain health, eg, keep the drive working hard, i have a 250gb maxtor 7200 rpm drive, chock full of music, and im just lost for words at trying to keep these thngs going. mind you i do run my computer hard, i leave it on for days at a time just downloading stuff, and encoding movies. its near a window for ventilation and i think it has ample fans and everything else, can anyone plz recomend something to elongate the life of my drive...holla back

[XtremeMaC]

what is your actual problem?

i mean at all hdd's u should defrag often,

for your hdd i think it'd help much if u partitioned it.

if u leave it on for a long time, u could get a hdd fan which will help.

if u're dling stuff often, u're hdd is probably very fragmented. also if u're encoding movies at the same time its even more fragmented

so my main thing obviously is fragmentation

ppl tend to say its not important, but it matters for me and i feel the difference...

[lvlolvlo]

too much "full defragmentation"along with heat can lead to drive failure. so just becareful.

Perhaps you should consider using NAS for storing your mp3s and what not and just leave a 160giger in your comp to encode your videos.

[mendipjohn]

too much "full defragmentation"along with heat can lead to drive failure. so just becareful

I agree, my HDD is only 120Gb, but I defrag it about every month or two, and that can take a while! I do try to strike a balance between need and performance.

I push my HDD quite hard at times but am always considerate towards it and try not to strain it for long periods of time. This includes not trying to defrag it at every oppertunity.

I guess whilst defragmenting eases the number of times the read head must move around each second (causing wear), the process of defragmentation can cause more of this than it might prevent if performed on a very regular basis?

I am not exactly a great expert on HDDs, but you know lots of 7200rpm HDDs use fluid bearings rather than ball bearings? I am sure I read somewhere a while back (probably a couple of years ago now) that there was the risk on some earlier or cheaper models, that extreme heat generated from the disk drive could itself evaporate the fluid in the bearing? That would eventually lead to failure.

[XtremeMaC]

heat is not much problem thesedays, i just bought another hdd fan for $7 just today.

anyways i don't fragment my hdd so much, once a month or sometimes even longer than that. i just wanted to point out defrag is good

i don't see any way of maintaining the hdd?

get an extra fan, partition it, break it shake it, move it, (heh sorry i'm so bored right now )