Pecos <anortRemOveThIs&2on21@mindspring.com> wrote in
news:Xns99338E8871F02Pecos@207.217.125.201:
<snip>
>> 1) Do not tap the drive.
>
> Now you tell me. :-) But you are right. For modern hard drives it is
> not a good idea to tap the hard drive as I did. For those who aren't
> old enough to know, some hard drives built in the 1980's used a thin
> film of lubricant on the platter that caused a problem known as
> striction. It was a widely known problem at the time that these
> drives could fail to spin up. The solution was to tap the drive on a
> hard surface, just hard enough to free the heads and light enough not
> to damage the drive internally. The spindle motor of these drives did
> not have enough torque on power-up to overcome the striction between
> the heads and the platters. Once spinning and, assuming you haven't
> damaged the internals, the drive was fine - until the next time it
> happened.
<snip>
I incorrectly stated that the problem was called striction in the
paragraph above. I discovered today that the problem is actually called
stiction, which stands for STatic frICTION.
Update - if you are interested:
I have received my replacement drive and all is well. It is refurbished
as expected. Seagate either forgot to send the prepaid return label or
was sending it by mail - minor problem. A call to their technical
support quickly resolved that.
I haven't looked at the firmware versions of the two drives yet, but the
model numbers and model names are the same and everything seems to be
working perfectly. I can't tell you how good it feels to have my RAID
working again. I won't ever go back to a single hard drive in any system
I buy or build in the future.
I have taken the opportunity to rebuild my array volumes. My initial
thought when setting up the striped/mirrored volumes was that I wanted to
maximize my storage space. The first configuration was 400 GB/33 GB RAID
0/RAID 1. I found that was the wrong strategy for me. I just didn't
have that much data to load that I was willing to lose. After completely
backing up my mirrored volume, I rebuilt the array to 150 GB / 158 GB
which will allow me a lot more room for my important mirrored data.
--
Alan Norton
Reviews: ABIT AN8 SLI, ECS P965T-A & Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Mb's
Arizona Pics and Cute Animal Pics
http://www.mindspring.com/~anorton1/