The Mother Board

[~PJ~]

... OK, so I use external HDDs a lot, as I tend to have to carry vast quantities of recordings from one place to another [like 150gig or so].
Bought two Apollo cases with 250Gb Samsung HDDs in - and they keep playing silly beggars [constant Windows Delayed Write Failed errors]. I sent them back, and got two new ones.

Ditto. So I downloaded the Hutil diagnostic from Samsung's website - which on three of these drives has come up with

'OEM Error Code -> 7P'

This may as well be in sanksrit for all the info I can find on it. The only clue I have is that is was duing the DMA test loop that it initially gave 'sector error'.

Three drives in a row? One of them starting behaving once I took it out of the enclosure and started using it with an IDE adaptor and powersupply, but it's not really satisfactory for carrying it around in my bag... I would imagine that it's a bad batch of cases - the fans are a bit prone to get very noisy and then stop working - but I'd like to know why they're doing this so I can avoid the makes which will. I need to be able to trust my music storage

Cheers.
_________________


Let there be respect for the earth,
Peace for its people,
Love in our lives,
Delight in the good,
Forgiveness for past wrongs,
And from now on a new start.

[~PJ~]

Using one as a guinea pig, I ran PowerMax [yes, I know it's not a Maxtor drive, but the original PowerMax works on any make which is why I like it!].
Full test came out clean, so I ran the low-level format. However, back in XP it's only seeing the HDD as 32Gb in Disk management... what I need to be able to do is wipe it of all partitions and format and start again - but the 98SE boot disks only read up to 32Gb if I remember correctly?
Any other useful tools out there which can do it?

Edit;
OK scrub that - muggins here got both jumpers in the wrong place ie. I limted the drives to 32 Gb...

So we're back to this business of the drives not working in the enclosures but work fine out of them. Overheating??
_________________


Let there be respect for the earth,
Peace for its people,
Love in our lives,
Delight in the good,
Forgiveness for past wrongs,
And from now on a new start.

[evasive]

Have you got any way of testing ANY other brand drive in those Apollo cases? I mean the drives not working in those cases and working without them screams to me those cases are not working properly...
_________________
We hate rut, but we fear change.



System error, strike any user to continue...

[~PJ~]

Can do - I've freed up a Maxtor 160Gb which has been working fine in the computer. Also, the suppliers are sending me two different cases to try with the cooling fans in a more logical place...
_________________


Let there be respect for the earth,
Peace for its people,
Love in our lives,
Delight in the good,
Forgiveness for past wrongs,
And from now on a new start.

[evasive]

Let us know how things work out. The quality of those external casings differs vastly and is not always price-related...
_________________
We hate rut, but we fear change.



System error, strike any user to continue...

[Karlsweldt]

Those external cases may not have a strong enough power supply for the drives. If the voltage is down only 5%, then the drive's speed will suffer, causing interleave errors which look like other problems. Do a voltage check with the drive in the enclosure and powered. If the voltage readings are down by more than 2%, then the power supply is a dud.. or the enclosure is! If the drive's platters slow, then the controller will increase power to get it up to rated speed.. causing a further drop in voltage level.
The drives worked perfectly when in a PC case, right?

[~PJ~]

[~PJ~]

Well, I've put one of the drives in a new case and so far [after forty eight hours of hammer] it seems fine. Case is no more than lukewarm, and no glitches. Haven't tried the Maxtor in the old case yet - at the moment it's my backup drive and I'm going to copy its contents to the other Samsung tomorrow before I start playing...
_________________


Let there be respect for the earth,
Peace for its people,
Love in our lives,
Delight in the good,
Forgiveness for past wrongs,
And from now on a new start.