The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

1. Yes I run in AHCI mode
2. SATA power connection, not molex with adapter
Perhaps i jiggled the power cord too much while plugging in the OSX disk

 

What are you talking about he is using RAID 5 so Shaffaaf how does AHCI work with that? Please explain becuase I must be missing something here?? Or is it you!

 

Sounds like you're doing everything right. FWIW though I had a friend of mine kill off a WD6401AALS by doing the exact same thing, and is having it platter-swapped at a data recovery centre to restore the data. I had the policy before this, but I still try never to hotswap internal drives.

 

When I said "NOT plug and play", I was referring to the 3Tb drives. THose are far from plug and play For myself, pretty close, for the general population, not so much

 

I won't hotswap internal drives it is too easy to wipe the drive out even if you are using AHCI those connectors aren't really designed for that. If I choose to have hotswap I use a carrier with a back plane designed for doing just that. When using eSATA I always have the drive powered and cabled up before plugging the eSATA into the PC.

 

http://www.icybox.com.tw/page/3.5_products/3.5_ib-111stus2wh.htm

Best invention ever

 

Correct, the RAID drives connected to the controller card do not care about an AHCI setting.
Maybe i didnt explain fully but i wasnt plugging the drive into the RAID card, i installed a drive normally and in the process dropped a drive from the array. I was questioning how one thing could affect the other and explained why i thought it was a power issue and asked for other ideas to verify/negate my line of reasoning.

EDIT---I will play it safe in the future by powering down, but i wasnt worried about data loss on the drive i was installing. The fact it killed an unrelated drive was what worried me.

 

Ha ha! Your icybox is similar to my BlackX Thermaltake bay. I love it! Best thing I've bought lately. Though the 3Tb is probably gonna steal that title

Although that cheap NAS enclosure sure is handy. My mother loves it. And it's still working well by the way

 

That makes more sense, my best guess would be you spiked the power line when hooking up the AHCI drive and it caused havoc with the RAID. I actually have seen that before and had to do just like you and rebuild my array. In the future if you are going to do this again it might be better to hook up the power before plugging in the data line, the drive will be spin up and be ready to go then, but you can still have this problem again even doing that.

 

Part of the best invention ever is that it has eSATA

 

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I know why omeg, I was just busting balls, anyway as you and sammy explained, I do understand how fast one can acquire a lot of space fast especially with movies, something I finally started learning how to do with the Internet, getting movies that way was always Chinese to me, Russ gave me some basics around 6 months ago and of course I'm still learning a lot by trial and error.

I stopped going to blockbuster as they closed the last brick shop in my area, so that much took care of me renting stuff, yeah and I still do the Internet rental from them but way to slow and limited, so yes finally I forced myself to learn how you guys have been doing it for ages, I have a love and hate relationship doing it that way but really not complaining, I am always fascinated at new things, it didn't take long to learn fast as how you get these movies, how, from where, from whom etc. without running into problems, so trail and error you start to pick up on many do's and don't's.

My one of many things I still am dying to figure out are like the different formats, the sizes e.g. how in the hell can a BR download from the net that was only 7 or 8 hundred mb turn to 4gb after converting, stuff like that amazes me, or even vise versa when a download was 8gb than after conversion turns to only 3.5gb even though I have it set for a dvd9, weird, anyway I love learning all this new stuff and one way or another sooner or later figure it out.

My biggest beef is with the subtitles, since all my kids are deaf and my hearing sucks we need them, trying to get the proper ones and especially getting the ones that are synchronized, you wanna talk about a pain in the butt, I always need to obtain at least a dozen if I can and be lucky if one works, yeah it's a pain but I just deal with it.

What does confuse me in all the space you guys need and believe me when it comes to movies I know how fast that space can go, but didn't you guys always talk about external HDD for this purpose than storing all your collections in them, cause the conversations where having here e.g. omeg wants all this space for internals, doesn't that defeat the purpose, and how about the heat inside the case wow, I'm not asking because I'm disagreeing, I'm asking cause what am I missing here.

And last I know it's an old subject we all beefed about before why some of us still use dvd's for movie storage as many here use the externals, it's a great idea I wish I could get into but still run into the biggest problem as you need a pc in every room to do that, Iv,e always complained why can't somebody invent a player that I can just load an external like loading a dvd, yes Russ once did point out that can be done now with I forgot the name of that box you just insert your external and off you go, but you still need a pc nearby to do it, so hey, there's a lot of smart techies here on this forum, invent me a player that I can insert my external without a pc, talk about making a fortune, I have a strong suspicion one will come.

 

There can be compatibility issues with them as well but even still they are nice to have. I typically use USB dongles that are compatible with 2.5 & 3.5 drives SATA or IDE but if you don't man handle the docking stations and push power buttons through the case they work great. Sorry Creaky I couldn't resist.

 

Internet-based TV/film is encoded, in much the same way (albeit using different code) as music is. Music on a CD is 700MB for a 70-80 minute album, yet in MP3 form, you can fit 10 hours plus at a modest bitrate in the same size. It works the same way for video, including high-def. When you have a bluray, it'll be 20-50GB in size for 1.5-3.5 hours of video, but a 1080p rip of the film need only be 7-20GB in size, and that's good quality. 720p is obviously half that size. If you're making a proper bluray from one of these rips, even though it gains you nothing in terms of image quality, the file size will increase again, similarly to burning a CD-player-compatible Audio CD from some small MP3s.

 

By the way Fred, such things do sort of already exist. They're maybe not instant plug-and-play but devices like the popcorn hour allow the insertion of your disk drives, and play the content from them straight to a TV like a DVD player would, without a PC being needed.

 

Exactly the same method I use, I've seen too many mishaps with RAID for me to ever rely on it. 'Hillbilly RAID' as its known, isolates the drives from:
-Bad luck (more than 1/2 drives failing in the same period)
-Batch faults (where several drives fail together due to a bad batch of drives)
-Power surges / Machine power faults (where multiple drives get zapped by a bad PSU or mains power surge)
-Theft/Damage (where the entire PC could potentially be stolen or dropped/damaged)

It's one step away from offsite backup, which should always be used if your data is absolutely mission-critical.

 

LOL, I love this particular forum, even though I do not understand everything you guys explain I do get some of it, and getting just some is still fine with me, like this raid stuff lol, way over my head, we all have our why's on using dvd's and HDD storage, and all still are good points, even though I can't disagree with HDD storage, I do think it's great, I would love to eliminate all my dvd's cause truth is I am getting run over by them, soon the tv show the hoarders will have to come over and help me lol, but we need them for the convience as I explained many times before.

Of course my only two quirps on HDD movie storage is the one not be able to go from romm to room, and second the life span, can you imagine loosing like 500 movies at one shot cause one of your 2 or 3 tb externals went south, after all that work I would need a diaper, and yes I know this issue is still not solved, but I still think in the near future it will. If I had the smarts and the bucks, I'll be damed if I wouldn't give it a shot.