Hard drives keep Parking! themselves whenever....

  • Thread starter Thread starter LrT
  • Start date Start date
L

LrT

Help anyone.

I have an unusual thing happening, wondering if its normal, or if
anyone else has had this:

When using my computer, my hard drives will intermittently make the
sound (2 -3 times in a row) as if they are "parking" themselves as if
you were shutting down the computer. This happends once to twice over
a few hour period of using the computer. Lots of click, click, clack
noises. Usually the hard drives are silent...can't even hear them
access data. This has never happened to me before.
I do however have a new device in the system: A CMD Medly 649 raid
controller. Heres the rest of the hardware:
Asus A7V8X built on sound, lan
Athlon Thouroughbred 1700+ oc'd to 1916Mhz
512MB PC2700
IEEE1394 card with VIA chipset
StarTech PCIIDE100R Raid controller -
contains the CMD 0649 chip
2 WD800JB 80gig Western Digital HD's hooked each to a port on the
controller and in a raid 0 striped set
The hard drives were not bought at the same time, and they do look and
perform slightly differently from each other.
WD800JB-00CRA1 is the new one
WD800JB-00FMA0 is the old one

The SMART data on both says they're OK.
I am running Windows XP sp 1

Is the controller responsible for the hard drives doing this?
Or will I be looking for a replacement drive soon?
It sounds like both drives are parking together.

Thanks for help
LrT
 
I have an unusual thing happening, wondering if its normal, or if
anyone else has had this:
Click to expand...

Just a thought: check the power management and see if there's a
setting for making hard drive sleep after x minutes, that could be the
cause. Turn it off if you don't need it.
 
Impmon said:
Just a thought: check the power management and see if there's a
setting for making hard drive sleep after x minutes, that could be the
cause. Turn it off if you don't need it.
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly. Probably the new drive has a power management feature
like that, even if the Windows and/or BIOS power management doesn't kick
in.

--
I win!

"Yeah dad, we'd rather have a live pussy mincing around the house than a
dead hero anyday!"
- Bart Simpson
 
DanielEKFA said:
My thoughts exactly. Probably the new drive has a power management feature
Click to expand...
^^^^^ --- correction: controller.
--
I win!

"Yeah dad, we'd rather have a live pussy mincing around the house than a
dead hero anyday!"
- Bart Simpson
 
LrT said:
Help anyone.

I have an unusual thing happening, wondering if its normal, or if
anyone else has had this:

When using my computer, my hard drives will intermittently make the
sound (2 -3 times in a row) as if they are "parking" themselves as if
you were shutting down the computer. This happends once to twice over
a few hour period of using the computer. Lots of click, click, clack
noises.
Click to expand...

So, what is it, "2-3 times parking 'in a row'" or "Lots of click, click, clack
noises once to twice over a few hour period of using the computer"?
 
I have an unusual thing happening, wondering if its normal, or if
anyone else has had this:

When using my computer, my hard drives will intermittently make the
sound (2 -3 times in a row) as if they are "parking" themselves as if
you were shutting down the computer.
Click to expand...


Hi there.
(New to group , waves hello ! )

This sounds very much like what happend to me over the weekend, although not
as problematic as mine !
Playing a bit of Age of Mythology, every now and again I would hear a
clickety click from the PC, and the game would freeze for a couple of
seconds. Anyway - I carried on playing on regardless ( soon to be regretted
! ).
In the end the machine crashed, and then wouldn't come back up. When It
attempted to boot XP, the splash screen that comes up was all currupted (
ramdom graphics over the animated bit - all different colors ).


My working theory is that it was because I was using the same power loom to
power both HD's a CDRW and 2 fans !. One of my fans, I think it is the PCI
card exhaust one had, upon inspection, a particulary dodgy power connector,
in fact, some of the wires were loose, and popping out !!

I decided to re-wire the whole lot, and this time chose to power the two
HD's off one loom, and all the rest with what was left .

I dunno if the fans could have contributeded towards a "dirty" supply, or
more likley that because there was an unsound connection somewhere in the
loom, then that was causing the trouble.

After the re-wire, no more clickety click......, but still no XP !!

So I used the R console to check the disk ( which is 2 X 250G SATA drives,
configured as raid-0 )
This took a while, as some errors were found, but in the end completed
sucsesfully.

XP still not booting, as before though, so used the XP CD to repair the
system, and after that, everything is back to normal.

I guess that the clucking was the drive parking / going down, because of
dodgy power connection, and as I played on, it must have caused some
filesystem curruption. So chkdisk and the repair sorted all of that.


Have a look in your event viewer, in mine I had coresponding messages
telling me that my drive ( it lists it as the device ) " did not respond in
a timley manner ".

I hope this helps you out.

Rob
 
Previously Urk said:
Hi there.
(New to group , waves hello ! )
Click to expand...
This sounds very much like what happend to me over the weekend, although not
as problematic as mine !
Playing a bit of Age of Mythology, every now and again I would hear a
clickety click from the PC, and the game would freeze for a couple of
seconds. Anyway - I carried on playing on regardless ( soon to be regretted
! ).
In the end the machine crashed, and then wouldn't come back up. When It
attempted to boot XP, the splash screen that comes up was all currupted (
ramdom graphics over the animated bit - all different colors ).

My working theory is that it was because I was using the same power loom to
power both HD's a CDRW and 2 fans !. One of my fans, I think it is the PCI
card exhaust one had, upon inspection, a particulary dodgy power connector,
in fact, some of the wires were loose, and popping out !!
Click to expand...

[...]

Rule of thumb: not more than two connectors between PSU and any device.
That means at most one Y-adapter or Pass-tru fan adapter between
a HDD/CD/whatever and the PSU. The probme is that the copnnectors
are pretty low quality, possibly the cheapest model in the market
when the PC was designed.

Arno
 
[...]
My working theory is that it was because I was using the same power loom to
power both HD's a CDRW and 2 fans !. One of my fans, I think it is the PCI
card exhaust one had, upon inspection, a particulary dodgy power connector,
in fact, some of the wires were loose, and popping out !!
Click to expand...

[...]

Rule of thumb: not more than two connectors between PSU and any device.
That means at most one Y-adapter or Pass-tru fan adapter between
a HDD/CD/whatever and the PSU. The probme is that the copnnectors
are pretty low quality, possibly the cheapest model in the market
when the PC was designed.

Arno
Click to expand...

Now well learned Arno !

In fact, I'm going to be ultra cautious, and keep the more sensitive devices
( ie, my RAID disks ) all to themselfs !

The fans and passthroughs can sit with the CDRW / DVD / floppy drives,
because at least I won't suffer data loss / curruption if the supply is not
100% perfect....

Rob.
 
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