Hello! I have an old Maxtor 53073U6 (Firmware DA620CQ0) Serial No (K60BMHKC). I noticed the HDD was reading slow like less than 3 MB/sec. Today I noticed it went under 1 MB/sec in some benchmark tests (hdparm /dev/hda command in Debian/Linux). It is not consistent. It never goes above 5 MB/sec....

I have a Dell computer, running XP Pro SP2. It came with a 40 gig EIDE drive which is almost filled. It also has a SATA interface on board. So I figured I would jump to a 160 gig SATA drive. Here are my questions: 1) What brand should I get? Is anyone making particularly better/faster drives...

The connectors seem to be far better made as well. I'm running a 9 gb hard drive for my OS and any programs that have to run on C: drive. So far, its more than big enough. Its really noisy though. Sort of a whine that drills into your head after a few hours. What about a noise suppressing...

I think the Partition Commander bootdisc idea was the best one but wasnt there a thread here (or on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage?) a year or so ago which said that you could use xcopy with a suitably huge number of switches to copy ALL files from one drive to another including hidden, system...

I have seen various comments like "we leave our servers running 24/7 because powering up a hard drive causes more wear than leaving it running." I think it's mostly laziness and apathy about conserving energy. The TiVo forums discuss it a lot because a standard TiVo HD runs all the time, buffering...

If one has multiple drives, in a single system, and the normal boot(C) drive's power plug is disconnected, will the other(D) drive automatically become the boot drive if it also has an operating system installed? Are there any short or long term negative effects to switching between boot drives...

I noticed my five(?) years old office PC's HDD is getting slower and slower these days. I wonder if it is dying. I don't see anything in SMART colors to show any issues. The technical values confuse me: smartctl -a sda smartctl version 5.38 Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is...

http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/ I need to do an image back up a machine. This looks like a better solution than Ghost. Acronis allows you to do scheduled back ups which is also a plus. Ideally I want to set up the clone machine next to the older machine. Plug them both into the...

I was poking around to see why my old Linux/Debian box was rarely and randomly crashing with kernel panics. I read that its errors can be found in /var/log/syslog (dmesg didn't show me anything related to Kernel panics that I could find): # cat /var/log/syslog .... Mar 4 23:12:07 foobar...

I have a perplexing problem here. I went on vacation outside of the country, and when I got back my Windows 7 desktop lost almost all of its user login accounts (5 altogether), except for one. The one that isn't lost, cannot be logged into, as the password doesn't get accepted. The machine also...

I've got a Seagate ST3200822AS SATA drive in an HP Media Center PC m1170n. The drive's controller is ailing - when the drive works it works slowly, but after it's in use for one or two minutes it suddenly disappears from the bus, and the PC can no longer detect it (not even in the BIOS menus) until...

I'm setting up a new boot drive of 120 GB (and I'm also going to have an 80 GB, but there's already stuff on that), and I intend to use XP Home as my main OS. But I also want to learn this Linux thing I've been hearing about, so I want to make a separate partition for that. So what's the best way...

Just bought a 2nd hand Dell Powervault 120T (a DLT7000 tape drive with an autoloader on the front). Each time I eject a tape I get the CT symbol appearing on the LCD. what does thi smean? Dell appears to have absolutely no manual available to download! The only thing I can think of is it means...

I have a weird problem when I run chkdsk /r on a NTFS partition (win XP SP2). I get a the message like: "Windows replaced bad clusters in file 733 of name \FOLDER\FOLDER\FILE.EXT." It's weird because chkdsk also reports: "Windows has checked the file system and found no problem." And "0 KB in...

I have always been confused about the use of the term "back up." Boot disks provided with new computers seemed to make system back-ups redundant, even though nearly everyone I know has at least two copies of boot disks in addition to the factory manufacturer's. I could never understand this. As...

"John Smith" wrote in message ... This web site at http://www.ata-atapi.com/ says that SATA is currently unreliable. Is SATA really this unreliable? Yes, this is why it is so important to use SCSI when you are building a system that is...

Does any company currently make good quality two terabyte SATA hard drives? I have read that both Seagate and Western Digital now have severe quality problems and that Hitachi and Samsung have been bought up by Seagate and Western Digital. Are there any reasonably priced drives that will last...

In the last two weeks, I've had two Maxtor hard drives fail. Hard. The first was a Maxtor external USB2 drive in the original Maxtor case. The second is a Maxtor drive in a generic external USB2 case. Both were pretty heavily used. The error I get is a popup stating "Delayed write failed --...

Hello, (Please reply to the group, as my email is currently broken). I am unable to read any files from my primary slave drive, and would be very grateful for any advice from those more experienced. My primary master hard drive was partitioned into two partitions using Partition Magic some time...

I often move my hard drives around between my home PCs. I use 80-conductor ribbon leads. All my hard drives are configured for Cable Select. When I have two hard drives on my primary IDE port and I remove the one at the far end then my BIOS recognises the drive in the middle but then it stops...