I do daily 3-d rendering using Bryce 5, which generates files anywhere from a few megs to hundreds of megs each. I have blown up my THIRD hard disk in a little over 2 years of Brycing on two separate machines! In the first two failures, the drives were solitary. Just yesterday, my other machine, storing files on the slave disk, developed bad sectors on that slave drive. I always use Roxio's GoBack, which has saved me on many occasions, but I suspect that the disk history activity, that is to say writing the backup files on another partition, is maybe causing excessive drive wear.
It might be helpful to provide system specs to possibly reveal what’s going on here. Both machines are home-built using different, commercially available, unmodified cases, one a tower, the other a desktop with Antec 400W power supplies replacing the original supplies and running Win98se. Both machines have Shuttle AK-32a MOBOs, each with 512megs of PC2100 RAM. In the desktop machine, which uses solitary drives, one failed Maxtor and another failed Seagate, 10 and 40 gigs respectively, I was using unmodified Kingwin removable HD trays to swap out drives quickly for different applications. I suspect that poor Kingwin venting may have caused heat-related failures. I have since begun cutting out the bottom of these plastic cases and eliminating the removable metal tray top to allow better air circulation from the case fans. So far, so good with that machine.
The latest failure is in the tower with a 120gig Western Digital acting as the slave drive with three 30gig partitions. The “D” partition, the one with my Bryce5 files, the one on which I might save the same 100meg file 5 or ten times a session while working, doing this every day for the past 2.5 years, is the one now with 2,000,000 bytes in bad sectors. Roxio GoBack writes backup files for any file changes made on the “D” partition to the “F” partition on that Western Digital HD. The “F” partition also shows some 2,000,000 bytes in bad sectors. Both “D” and “F” partitions took over 24 hours to run scandisk while “E” took only 7 hours. Interestingly, the “E” partition, used only for periodic backups, reveled a mere 400,000 bytes in bad sectors. All three had errors, some of which scandisk could not correct. This drive is not making any funny noises, unlike the solitary, failing desktop drives which made the usual death-throe scapes and clunking. Swap files, typically running 200-300megs, are still managed on the 10gig Western Digital master drive on that tower machine.
I don’t know if this helps provide any insights. Do you recommend adding those screw-on HD fans that mount under each HD when I replace this drive? Case temps in the two machines as determined by MOBO Monitor are typically 35C. Power management shuts off the HDs after 30 minutes of inactivity. Finally, both machines reside in my finished basement, which is rather damp in the summer months. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
