HD Killer. (1 Viewer)

[te3hpurp]

This might sound as provocative, but it's not, only to catch attention.

Third within half year, died last night. Every previous HD that have died were those used for timeshifting.

They are side by side with OS hd, which has been fine since 2007. Ventilation should be okay, or then it's
Quality of Samsung spinpoint drives.

I'm seriously considering to start using RAM disk, since timeshifting forced to be always on.

regards,

 

[corvy]

Yes you are right, timeshifting can be stressing for a normal HDD. Therefor there is also special harddrives from most vendors for this purpose. I am contemplating buying a 16 or 32GB SSD SATA disk for this purpose, should be perfect for the task. Might even go for a 64GB and put the OS on it aswell

 

[RobNorthcott]

I've had great success using a USB flash stick for timeshifting. There may be some luck involved in the combination of components because other people say they get bad stuttering, but mine has been absolutely fine for months. It seems to work better when formatted to NTFS for some reason (I did get some stuttering using FAT format on the stick).

I don't know how well it would work with HD content though - I only use SD channels.

Got to be worth a try for the price of USB sticks these days (I'm using a 4GB stick that cost me £5) before shelling out silly money on a SSD.

Rob

 

[RobNorthcott]

I don't know how well it would work with HD content though - I only use SD channels.

Just a quick update to say that I'm now using BBC HD and ITV HD with no problems, still on the same cheap 4GB flash stick.

Rob

 

[Bulla]

Samsung spinpoint have many documented problems I had several fail on me before ditching them for WD and Seagates.

 

[corvy]

For some reason I never got this to run smootly .. but I might try again

Thanks Rob.

 

[gxtracker]

the HTPC i have built for my parents has a Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM SATAII drive in it, and it does about 7 hours of recording a day. on top of that, several more hours of timeshifting as people are watching TV.

I think the big benefit i have with this machine is that there is a low speed intake fan blowing right across the HD. If there was only one thing I learned from working in datacentres, its that if you keep your HD's cool, then they will last for quite a while.

 

[MLH01]

I recently installed Dataram RAMDisk, which is free up to 4GB. Anything above that and you need to pay a fee. This software works for XP, Vista and a few others.

With 4GB memory in the HTPC, I've set the ramdisk size to 1GB and the timeshift folder to point to it. There is very little hard disk access during timeshifting (as expected), and it works well for me. I only watch SD content at the moment, but there is room for increasing the RAM and ramdisk size if needed for HD content.

As gxtracker mentioned, keeping things cool will reduce hardware failures as well

MLH01.

 

[Snader]

Having a samsung spinpoint (1Tb) here for two years now, no problems yet! (and watching TV a lot!)

 

[zicoz]

Samsung spinpoint have many documented problems I had several fail on me before ditching them for WD and Seagates.

I have had alot of Samsun drives the past few years, started with 500GB and I'm now on their 1.5 TB and I've only had 1 drive die on me and that was only because it fell down from the table. And I wouldn't recomend Seagate to anyone due to their problems the past couple of years.