The Site With the Lamp

March 3, 2006

What's worse than having a hard disk failure? Having two hard disk failures of course. Then what can you say about having three failed hard drives in one month?

Just a couple of days after one of my HDs started to throw up SeekComplete Errors, the second hard disk decided to follow suite. My drive setup is a bit wierd, I have some partitions that have been mirrored, and some that have been striped. All in the quest for speed.

All the data is backed up regularly into a third drive, one that has less of a work load than the other two. That makes it less likely to fail. As expected it did last a little bit longer than the other two, but the difference is less than a month!

Now all three hard drives attached to my computer complain about SeekComplete Errors. I still haven't lost any data though (thanks to frequent CD/DVD backups) but I am left with a dilemma about what remedial actions to take.

According to the three strikes you are out rule the motherboard should be replaced (what else can cause three failures in quick successsion?). This after all isn't even the first time i have lost HDs due to stewed motherboards. However with affordable dual core processors just around the corner, this certainly isn't the best time to invest in a new board and processor. It's equally obvious that buying a new IDE drive is asking for trouble.

In the end I decided to pick up a SATA II hard disk and a SATA controller card to go with it (cause the Mobo doesn't support SATA). I have read and heard that Fedora Core has trouble with SATA devices but the Silicon Image controller that I picked up was detected without any trouble at all, same goes for the hard drive.

The only catch is that the SATA controller is only 1.5Gbps and does not support the full speed of the device. But that doesn't matter since this is only a stop gap measure until dual core processors drop in price.