Raptor Crash

Replacement drive arrived 4pm today, Western Digital had told me it was on it's way by e-mail on Friday. So the complete turnaround was 14 days and it cost me £3.45. That's pretty good for a 3 year old drive in my book.

Bit of a dilemma though, I sent them a 74Gb Raptor and they've sent me back a 150Gb Velicoraptor.

This means I don't have a matched pair of 10,000rpm disks to use for a RAID 0. I wasn't sure whether to feel elated or cheesed off.

But I've had a think and I will buy another 150Gb Raptor when I get Win 7 and use the pair as a 300Gb main disk for the OS. Receiving this one disk - they cost £115.00 new - has tipped my favour to a pair of mechanical disks rather than a pair of SSD's for my soon-to-be Win 7 system.

As for the remaining 74Gb Raptor, that will go in my media machine for the OS together with my 1Tb disk from my main machine.

There will be a few other changes as well, shuffling disks about but I won't bore you all with the details ;)

Suffice to say, all has worked out well and I have found a use for everything :thumb:
 
That's a good turnaround! I'm glad to hear WD are on the ball and get replacements sorted easily.

Did they say anything about the 150GB drive, as it's a bit of a shame you don't have a matched pair... but considering you got a velociraptor instead I think you've done well overall ;)
 
Good result Flops, its not every day you get more than you paid for out of the blue. :thumb:
 
Ian Cunningham said:
Did they say anything about the 150GB drive, as it's a bit of a shame you don't have a matched pair... but considering you got a velociraptor instead I think you've done well overall ;)
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Nope, no explanation, they probably assume most people will be pleased.

And truth to tell - I was pleased :)

I was initially concerned that I wouldn't find a use for a 74Gb HDD - the remaining one of the original pair - but I have done so all is good.

Can't remember for sure but back in November 2006 I think I paid around £80.00 each for the 74Gb Raptors.

So I'm up on the deal.

Abarb:

You're quite right Squire, colour me chuffed :)
 
Well guess what? The other 74Gb Raptor packed up as well :(

Both were purchased in November 2006 so that's a three year life span.

Must have been from the same batch. Which reinforces my view that it's not the manufacturer but the factory where the hard disk was built and the quality of individually produced batches that influence a hard drive's reliability.

And also reinforces my view that brand loyalty, when it comes to hard drives, is mostly bunkum :)

Having said that I can honestly say that in the last fifteen years, Western Digital is the brand that has failed most frequently on me.

Oh well, here we go down the RMA road again, wonder if I get another 150Gb Velicoraptor as a replacement?

I have replaced the failed 74Gb Raptor which was in the media machine with an 80Gb SATA 2 Samsung I had lying around doing nothing so when the RMA replacement comes, I'm not really sure if I will have a use for it. We shall see.
 
Well well thats surprise can't believe the other would pack up so soon after the other, hope you get another 150GB Raptor Flopp's..
 
Sorry to hear that man...did you lose much data ?

Hopefully you will get another new one, even if you dont need it.
Incidentally the HD that was dropped 12 inches from the floor and never worked again was a WDigital. And it had a rubber protector thingy on it.
 
Only lost a bare bones XP OS that I was going to replace anyway. Now has my old copy of Vista on it that Win 7 replaced.

MS asked me to buy another serial number for Vista when I tried to activate it btw, but I went through that long-winded phone activation thingy and all was ok eventually.
 
Raptors ...You should have known they would be susceptible to failure m8, they are that old ..they belong in the Jurassic era :) ...tut tut ...

velociraptor.jpg
 
nah not yet...On call 24 till next Wednesday morning...grab a can when can time lol
 
floppybootstomp said:
Well guess what? The other 74Gb Raptor packed up as well :(

Both were purchased in November 2006 so that's a three year life span.

Must have been from the same batch. Which reinforces my view that it's not the manufacturer but the factory where the hard disk was built and the quality of individually produced batches that influence a hard drive's reliability.

And also reinforces my view that brand loyalty, when it comes to hard drives, is mostly bunkum :)

Having said that I can honestly say that in the last fifteen years, Western Digital is the brand that has failed most frequently on me.

Oh well, here we go down the RMA road again, wonder if I get another 150Gb Velicoraptor as a replacement?

I have replaced the failed 74Gb Raptor which was in the media machine with an 80Gb SATA 2 Samsung I had lying around doing nothing so when the RMA replacement comes, I'm not really sure if I will have a use for it. We shall see.
Click to expand...

Replacement arrived today.

And it's..... a refurbished 74Gb Raptor. Bugger :(

Oh well, win some lose some, lol

I shall put it back in the media machine to take the OS which I've just backed up using Acronis True Image.

And the 80Gb SATA II disk that was in there can go back in it's swappable caddy where it belongs.

Just out of interest, in my media machine I have the 74Gb Raptor and a 1Tb storage disk. The true bit count of both disks adds up to a true one terrabyte.

Well there's a thing eh? :)
 
The 'new' Raptor is now back in the media machine with cloned Vista OS on it.

But it was not without problems getting to that state.

Let me elaborate. For purposes of clarity I will refer to the computers involved by the names I have christened them with, Andromeda and Perseus.

There are two other machines in the family, Shinybeast and Atares, but they're not relevant here.

Andromeda = AMD 3.2Ghz dual core/2Gb 8400 memory/Asus M2N-Sli board/BFG 8800 GTS 640Mb/Lottsa Hard disks
Perseus = AMD 5050e Dual core 2.6Ghz/Asus M4N78-VM board/2Gb 8400 Memory/Integrated Nvidia 8200 grafix/1Tb total real storage within two hard disks

With me so far? Goody :)

First I hooked the new Raptor up to Andromeda loosely and formatted it within Windows Disk manager.

Within Perseus the Acronis back up file was on the storage disk, so I took out the 80Gb SATA 2 disk with Vista on and replaced it the the new Raptor. Booted with the Acronis 10 boot CD and noted the wireless mouse was very unresponsive, almost to the point of being unusable.

Keyboard was ok though so navigated with that. Then Acronis told me it couldn't see any harddisks. WTF? Then remembered I had chose to make the Raptor a 'Simple Disk' within format, not a primary disk. Aha, I thought, maybe that's the problem.

I hooked the Raptor up to Andromeda again and booted with Paragon Disk Manager from a floppy, which is a ten year old program. With this I formatted the Raptor to NTFS, made it a primary partition and gave it a Volume Title 'New_Perseus'.

But Acronis still wouldn't see any disks at all. Puzzling.

I know, I'll boot with The Ultimate Boot Disk Vol 4 which took a full seven minutes to arrive at Desktop. Chose a program named 'Disk Image' which saw both disks and was progressing to clone when it gave me a message 'Disks must be identical sizes to copy' What! You stupid stupid poxy flea-ridden software, what is it with you I screamed. There's, like, only 4Gb difference in size between the disks and the OS is only occupying around 18Gb anyway. Gurrrrr :mad:

Browsed a few other apps on the UBCD but none looked much cop and anyway I had the pox with it. So I got to thinking.

Aha, thought I, I know what to do.

Took the storage disk from Perseus, hooked it up to Andromeda and copied over the Acronis backup 'tib' file to 'My Documents'.

Then took that out and hooked up the new shiny formatted Raptor.

Then within Windows XP Pro on Andromeda used Acronis True Image 10 to restore the backed up tib file to the new Raptor.

Fitted Raptor and storage disk back in Perseus and all is good :)

But what a lotta messin' about eh?

And I'm still wondering why the Acronis Boot Disk wouldn't see my pair of SATA 2 disks in my Media machine. Quite worrying. I have since downloaded the disk recovery software from Seagate which I understand from others here is actually Acronis Boot Image V11.0 but I haven't installed it yet.

Anyhow, here's a few pix of the operation which shows the inside of my Antec Remote Fusion media case which in my opinion is very nice.

Note the optical drive is stored in a lift out cage to the front left; Front right there's room for two hardisks, both of which are fixed only with two screws from the top bracket, hanging down and are insulated by 4 big nylon pliable bushes to stop vibration; on the right hand side of the case there are a pair of 120mm quite fans which do a very good job of extracting hot air and there's room for a full ATX PSU. For such a small case I think Antec have done a fine job to get all that lot in.

But it will only take Micro-ATX motherboards though.

Here's the pix:

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016.jpg


017.jpg


018.jpg


The new Raptor details, note the word 'Recertified' which means a rebuilt drive, as they're not manufactured anymore.

019.jpg


Formatting and cloning with Andromeda:

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Shame you never got another 150.:)

By gum yer cases look clean. An thats a lot of hardware to squish in such a small space.
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Shame the colour scheme got spoilt by the crappy beige :p
 
Cases are clean cos the media case is quite new and the other one gets hoovered out fairly regularly, although dust can be spotted on the PSU that has gathered on the other side of the case vent.

As for the fans, you sir, are a philistine :D

Do you by any chance favour chintz and have a framed picture of a golden skinned lady wearing a blue silk dress against a background of the sea at night on some exotic beach somewhere. You know, that one they sell in Argos and was a firm favourite amongst with those living on the Ballymurphy Estate in the seventies and purchased in great quantity from British Stores :p

As it happens, I don't have to look at them but I rather like the look anyway. And amongst the fans they are the veritable Rolls Royce, the Remy Martin, the - how shall we say? The very Mata Hari of fans :D

And they work very well and very quiet :)

Anyhoo, thanks at least for commenting, apreciated ;)
 
More of a Bently, Stolchinoya, Nikita man meself along with the rustic old world style look to fit in with me cabin. Understated quality for the discerning connoisseur :p That is probably why I am attracted to linux
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Bently, Stolchinoya, Nikita. Hmm, Wot dey den?

A Bentl(e)y is a rather fabulous make of motor car that was once British; A Nikita is an Elton John Song or a drill, oh no, sorry, that's a Makita, or a young lady residing in a small village outside Chernobyl; and Stolchinoya is either a rather nasty form of torture devised by the KGB or a simply super make of Vodka.

All seems Russian to me. The Polish got a little confused with Russians during WW2, first they were fighting each other then they were fighting alongside each other.

Which led to that rather famous saying in Poland 'Never trust a Russian, for they swap sides on a whim and murder whales'.

Seems about right to me :)
 
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