The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Estuansis,
I couldn't agree more! I've never had a problem with any Seagate other than the one FedEx threw about 40 feet into the middle of my front yard! I don't buy anything over 250GB anyway, as I don't have the need, or want to put up with the additional noise larger drives make, not to mention what I would lose if one of them big suckers went down! LOL!! I have a couple of 10,000 RPM SCSI drives. Both are about 8 years old. The Iomega was in a server running 24/7 for 7-8 years and gives a new definition to the word LOUD, as it screams like a banshee! The 37GB Hitachi in the Dell 420 Workstation is going on 9 years old and it's still whisper quiet. You only hear it when it spins up on startup, and even then you have to listen very closely to hear it at all.

BTW! the 1.4GHz P-III, 1400S I had, won't work in the Intel server MB I have. The board was mislabeled. The label says D815EEA2, but it's a D815EEA, so no Server only chips, only Coppermines. It takes the regular socket 370 CPUs! I sold the SL657 1400S 1.4GHz Server chip to a Doctor friend of mine for his office server. It had an 1100S 1.1GHz in it before. The CPU works perfectly in it. He says it's much faster! I found a 1GHz chip for mine for $25, including shipping, and Rob is checking on one for me on Monday at his job.

The 700MHz one I just put together will replace the old Dell as a backup computer, as it's almost as fast with a 700MHz chip than the Dell is with a single Slot 1 1GHz chip. The Intel should work even better with a 1GHz in it! I had originally upgraded the Dell to two 1GHz slot 1's, but I couldn't turn down the offer I got for one of them, so it's just a single now! LOL!! I don't think it has a lot of life left in it, and if something goes, it's just too expensive to fix, as nothing is standard!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Russ: The 5400 and 7200 is a marketing scam, the drives are actually fixed 5400rpm.
I've only had one out of over a dozen WD drives fail due to its own fault, and even then it didn't lose any data.
Russ: The quietest HDDs you can buy only come in 500GB-2TB size (WD Green).

 

Then how do you explain ceiling fans, air conditioner fans, hair dryer speeds,electric cars and trains, and CD and DVD ROMS? You mean that Hard drive electric motors run at a constant velocity?

In regards to hard drive quality. The only hard drive that has failed me in some time is sadly my 150 gig Raptor, but then look at what it was asked to do and that was after a few years. I have both Seagate and WD drives and what determines my choice is often a mater of price and performance, but they both make excellent drives. Now at work I'm swapping out drives from HP and compaq (before they got married) work stations all the time, and wouldn't you know it, everyone of them is a Maxtor. A product I have never thought of purchasing.

 

Couldnt agree with you more. I replaced my moms recently!

 

all maxotr drives since 08 IICR are seagate, as seagate bought them out. they are just rebadged. even on the stickers, their 500GB ones said 7200.10

 

As far as I'm aware:
Maxtor Drives
Diamondmax up to 11 inclusive: Maxtor
Diamondmax 20 onwards: Seagate

Of course this changes yields no benefit in terms of noise or power consumption as Seagate and Maxtor share the bottom end of that table. However, reliability should be significantly improved.

 

Sophocles,
A number of the things you mentioned above, will not last as long as a HDD will! People don't get very fussed if their hair dryer or Ceiling fan quits after 3 or 4 years. What I'm talking about with ball, roller or needle bearing motors is they develop a mechanical set to the rotating parts. All I'm saying is that a motor run at, let's say medium speed, will bed in it's bearings based on it's environment of heat, vibration and balance. Once that set is developed, any change to that set, such as speed changes, load or balance, change the wear points of the bearing surfaces of any motor. It goes against the set, the bearing surfaces have developed.

I don't know if you remember the Quantum Fireball LCT series of IDE ATA/66 drives, but about 9-10 years ago, Quantum came out with the LCT, which was quieter and more vibration free than anything that had come before it. 3 platter, 5400 RPM, and quiet. That particular drive was designed from the ground up with that very intention! I still have one and use it often. I have all my diagnostic software on it. It makes working on computers a lot easier on me! LOL!! I just add the drive, and I have everything I might need to do the job!

The reason I mention this particular drive is because one of the things Quantum discovered in testing it, was that it's MTBF when run 24/7, was better than when it was turned on and off, a couple of times a day. That's the biggest reason I never turn off my hard drives! It doesn't save any power, as parking and un-parking the heads, and the spinning up of the drive, negate any savings. I have several drives that have 8 years or more of use on them.

The same principles apply to any motor. At a constant speed, any motor develops a wear pattern in it's bearing surfaces. Change it's speed and you change the points of those wear patterns, which accelerates wear!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I put a Maxtor in as a scrap drive a couple weeks ago and although it's probably the loudest drive, reliability doesn't seem all that bad. It's at least 6 years old and was most likely run 24/7 for most of it's life. Mind you I would never buy one, but for free it works alright.

 

Well I've reformatted and filled both of my new 500GB drives several times and they keep on going no problem. In my experience, high capacity drives are just as reliable as lower capacity ones. It's all in getting a good one to begin with!

Noise is also becoming a thing of the past. A lot of the older Seagate drives were really noisy, notably my retired 250GB. But the newer ones are whisper quiet. Both of my 320s and both of my 500s are absolutely silent in cases with moderate noise levels. The 500s right on my desk like 2 feet from me. The 320s on the floor like 3-4 feet away. I actually have to put my ear to the front of the case and turn down the fans to hear them working. They are definitely quiet!

 

Long live HDD's LOL!

 

Oman7,
I agree totally on the quietness of the Seagates. That's why the 250 DeathStar isn't my boot drive! No noise or vibration idling, but reads and writes are moderately noisy! You can't hear the Seagate at all unless you take the side cover off and stick your ear right in there! The DeathStar would be annoying as the boot drive, but it works well as storage and it doesn't take very long to transfer things, so the noise is usually minimal! I just don't need the drive space, so a 250 is my limit for now. My next one will be one of these! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148309

Best Regards,
Russ

 

My 3 speed Ceiling exhaust fan is 42 years old. It came with the house when we purchased it, and the house was built in 1967. Most electric motors do just fine with speed adjustments and many will last longer if they're ran at a lower speed because it just means less heat and wear and tear.

A hard drive uses a constant speed because of how the information is written and read to and from the disk. It's function not longevity that determines the type of motor. CD ROMs however have to adjust speed to compensate for the difference in read speed from the inner and outer parts of the disc because the outer edge of the disc at a fixed speed would run at a higher velocity. Anyone who's ripped a movie will note that transfer begins slowly and then increases almost throughout the rip until near the end before it winds down. Graphics card fan motors usually run at 25% of its potential velocity and then speeds up depending on how much stress the GPU is experiencing. Then there's CPU and chipset heat sink fans......

The two most common failures in a computer are hard drives and power supplies.

 

Sorry, what? I had a Toshiba DVD-ROM still working after 6 years, electric cars aren't really common enough to judge reliability, but electric trains last decades, and very seldom need motors changed. Again, my mum's last hairdryer lasted her about 10 years.
To be honest, I think the whole spin up and spin down is likely to wear HDDs down more than running them 24/7, but it depends how long you use them for in one sitting. If drives run for maybe 6 or 7 months without ever spinning down, I've hard a fair few storiesa that loads of them all fail at once when they're spun back up. RAID's not so good if 3/4 of the drives die at once!

The only Maxtor I've ever owned was a 40GB DM+8 I bought for £39 at a local PC shop back in 2005. It was noisy but it didn't fail, though I only used it for 18 months before acquiring a 37GB Raptor instead. I did, however use it again about 6 months ago and it was still working. However, of the number of failed HDD stories I know, I would still place Maxtor at the top, along with Hitachi/IBM.

 

That was my experience with my 250GB as well. No noise until I was actually using it. To be fair, it still works just fine though in my external enclosure and it's at least 4 years old now!

Lol agreed. But in my own experience it's: PSU -> Motherboard -> HDD -> RAM. In order from most often to least. But again, It's all in picking good brands to begin with. Cheap components fail. period. The worst offending motherboard are almost always Foxconn, TUL, ECS, ASRock. I dunno why. They're just not made of the same stuff as a Gigabyte or an ASUS.

 

Number of failed components I've had
CPUs: 0
RAM: 1 stick fail, 1 stick destroyed (Elixir PC3200 DDR1, Samsung PC2700 DDR1 respectively)
HDD: 1 drive faulty, 3 drives destroyed (WD5000AAKS, WD5000AAKS (Same drive), SP2504C, WD2000JB)
PSU: 2 failures (Qtec 450W, Magna Value 600W)
GPU: 1 card fail, 1 card destroyed (Sapphire HD3870 Single Slot, Powercolor HD3870)
ODD: 3 drives fail (Acer 40x20x10, BenQ 40x20x10, NEC ND-4570, suspected starforce for latter)
M/B: 4 boards fail (Asus A8N-SLI SE, P5N-E SLI, A8R-MVP, Gigabyte X48-DS5)

 

I've never had a truly failed CPU. But I got a Q9450 with stuck thermistors. So I returned it and got a Q6600 instead. It still hit 3.7GHz so no big loss XD

I also had an Evga 7600GT with a blown cap(they sent a 7900GS for $20 because the 7600 was OOP and I ebayed it), A Plextor DVD-RW Stardocked, a GA-965P-DS3 with a blown cap(they replaced it with the v1.33 board for free), and a GA-M61P-S3.

 

i have had:

a q9550
maximus ii formula
p4 prescott 3.06ghz
p5k-e
p5n-e
4850
7800gt
roccat kone 2 times

 

I have a rant for the day. I woke up today and like many others around here had a NewEgg email about an OCZ 30GB SSD for $99 after $20 rebate.
After doing basic research on it I decide to buy because I've been interested in SSD technology and had a few dollars burning a hole.
Everything goes well and receive confirmation of transaction email and the world is happy. About an hour later while looking for 2.5 to 3.5 bay internal adapter I noticed those drives were sold out. I was glad I had made my order. Well I just recieved another email saying the payment was declined and this was with a payment method in their system that hasnt changed in the last 20 times I've ordered.
I'm thinking they oversold and are using it as a method to protect themselves from liability.
I went back and resumbit payment information but no confirmation respone and after nothing but good words about Neweggs service I'm kinda wondering at the moment.

 

sammorris,

Number of failed components I've had with personal builds in 20 years
CPUs: 4 1 Pentium 200 (DOA), 1 Pentium D (MB failure), 1 E6750 (Voltage, my fault), 1 7750BE (Chipset Problem)
Ram : 0
HDDs: 3 1 WD 1GB, 1 Maxtor 80GB (firmware problem), 1 Seagate 160 (DOA FedEx destroyed)
PSUs: 3 1 Black Chrome 460w, 1 Cool Max 500w, 1 Thermaltake 500w TR-2
GPUs: 0
ODDs: 8 1 Sony/NEC/Optiarc AD7170 (PSU Failure), 1 Pioneer, (2 Pioneer, 2 Lite-On*) *Chipset problem with motherboard. All 4 were probably OK, 1 Sony (Twice, the replacement failed as well) Sony would not honor the warranty because their replacement was a re-built drive with a 90 day warranty. Only got 6 months of use out of them combined!
M/Bs: 4 2 Asus P5P-800SE (same one twice), 1 Gigabyte P35-DS3R Rev 1.0, 1 Gigabyte 790P-UD4H

Customer builds (over 300 in 20 years)
CPUs: 0
Ram : 1 stick of Kingston 512MB DDR
HDDs: 0
PSUs: 2 Cool max 500w
GPUs: 0
ODDs: 1 Lite-On
M/B : 4 1 Biostar M6100 (Incorrect bios from BioStar, their error), 1 Biostar 780GX (DOA), 2 Asus P5N-E SLI (assorted horrors, LOL!)

I've also had 1 motherboard that wouldn't run a P4 Prescot CPU (ECS), even though it said they were supported. It was replaced with an Asus P4P-800SE. Given the number of builds involved, I've had very few problems with customer builds. I've also probably forgotten a few things over 20 years, but overall, I've had great success with customer builds!

Footnote: AMD shipped my CPU today. Not their fault for the delay. UPS managed to take 7 days for a 6 day delivery. Their fault entirely as it sat at LAX for 4 days. That's why it was a day late, ariving at AMD Late Friday afternoon. It took less than one working day for AMD to test the old one (Defective) and ship the replacement back to me! It's on it's way, with none of the BS that Intel gives you, and they don't require the CPU cooler back, just the CPU!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Deadrum33,
I would absolutely disagree with you there! Newegg has always extended the deal on any sold out item, unless it a strict quantity thing, where stock at that price was limited! I guarantee if you call them and explain the problem, they will take care of it, at the price quoted. That's why I do almost all my buying from them! It may cost me a few dollars more than shopping around, but their customer service is second to none, and that makes the small difference in price worth it to me!

My best Newegg story! They gave me an instant $30 credit when I sent them a copy of the e-mail Corsair sent me, claiming that they had never gotten the rebate form for my current memory, when I checked it on line. 30 days later the rebate arrived, and I called Newegg to offer payment back for the credit they gave me. They refused and told me to consider it a gift from Newegg! They are the best, and they do bend over backwards for you!

Respectfully,
Russ