Hey, just wanted to note on here (rather than send out a bunch of PM's and posts everywhere), that I'll be out for a week or so. My PC decided to start biting it (HD failure signs, then seemingly a videocard failure). So it'll be almost a week by the time I get new parts in, and get everything up and running again. Then maybe a bit longer for me to catch back up with stuff.
I can still read the forum and post a little bit from work.
My NES projects are just fine though, I didn't lose anything on the HD (yet, AFAIK). The important stuff is backed up twice a day automatically. But for this Seagate 1.5TB HDD, this will be the 3rd time I've had to send it in for replacement under warranty! (first 2 times were when it was brand new). So to remind everyone, if you don't already, keep backups!
Unfortunately the vidcard I had, was built by BFGTech and they went out of business. It would have been under warranty.
Oh, and the week before, the power supply for my wife's laptop failed, also. Still waiting on the replacement to arrive for that. What a horrible week it's been for computer-running. Only computer that still works is the one in my MAME cabinet.
Memblers wrote:
Only computer that still works is the one in my MAME cabinet.
LOL! I've been there before, recently
Good luck to you, and enjoy some MAME'in while your PC's dead.
You put your tesla coil too close to your other toys.
Okay man, hope it all works out easily!
It turns out to be pretty stable if I run in safe mode. Though the other day it had very "stable" yellow tinted stripes when doing this. Considering that, and that the BSOD error is "driver stuck in infinite loop" (for the video driver), hopefully that's all there is to it.
Seemed wierd to have 2 things fail it once, but I guess really I'm actually not surprised by that HDD.
Memblers wrote:
Seemed wierd to have 2 things fail it once, but I guess really I'm actually not surprised by that HDD.
That seems to happen to me all the time...
For a long time everything works fine, and then BAM!
All of the sudden everything seems to commit suicide at once.
(Might be just me though...)
A HDD that fails that often doesn't sound realiable. Never had a Seagate one and I think that'll stay like that...
The larger the dri e the more likely it is to fail, just because the densities get too high. Or at least that's what Steve Gibson says.
Your video driver issue may have something to do with the bad disk. Maybe one if the driver files has been damaged.
If you need a replacement drive (say, a 500GB SATA drive) that's been fully tested (all LBAs checked, no errors), let me know and I can send you one for free, Memblers. I have lots of spare/leftover hardware laying around, and I'd rather it go to good use.
I won't have a spare video card for 2-3 weeks (waiting on a Gigabyte RMA, re:
my GTX 560 Ti went bad, with screenshots! :D), but if you want it let me know (though you'll have to pay for it, since it's basically new).
Thanks koitsu, but I already ordered another drive and vidcard. Figured I would back it all up before doing the RMA. Then I'll have more storage than I'll know what to do with, heh. Lots of old stuff, the NES folder has survived since 1996 (nes-lord, nesa.com and a few ROMs being the oldest).
qbradq: My main drive is a solid-state type (which I'd recommend to anyone, it's totally worth the cost). Unfortunately, crashes continued after removing the failing drive, and removing/reinstalling the drivers (also cleaned the heatsink and sped up the fan).
I had a drive die on me and I lost everything. So I said, that'll never happen again, and I always have a mirrored RAID setup now.
I've had my drive die twice since I have mirroring, but thankfully, I just swap in another one and I'm back up.
I recommend mirroring or dropbox for critical data.
Solid state.. I have Been thinking about it but it just fell too early and we don't know yet how much failure they will be in the future. But I didn't buy any new hardware since 3 years ago so maybe they became better since then? ^^;;
Solid state drives rock now! I've got a 32 GB solid-state drive for my laptop (because I'm cheap), and I would never go back. The speed improvement is very noticeable.
As for failure rates, I am not too sure about the consumer grade drives, but the commercial drives from Intel have a failure rate around 0.03% per year for our disk arrays here at work. For comparison we see around a 6% per year failure rate for our disk-based drives, and those have a much lower I/O demand.
Re: SSD failure rates -- and you don't necessarily need to read French to understand it:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/810-6/t ... sants.html
SSDs are nice for OS/boot drives, though you get to deal with the 4KB/8KB page alignment ordeal -- you have to make sure your primary partition starts on a 4KB or 8KB boundary, or else your performance ends up sucking. Vista and Windows 7 seem to do the "right thing" during partitioning, but 2K/XP requires manual intervention.
www.hardware.fr wrote:
For the first time, we also integrate SSDs in this article type. The rates of failure recorded by manufacturer:
- Intel 0.59%
- Corsair 2.17%
- Crucial 2.25%
- Kingston 2.39%
- OCZ 2.93%
Intel stands here with a failure rate of the most flattering. Among the few models sold over 100 copies, displays a rate of no more than 5% VAS.
That makes sense to me. We use Intel drives here at work. One thing I forgot to mention is that when I say an SSD "failed" I mean "failed prior to it's expected failure date" as specified by the manufacturer. These things do have limited erase cycles after all
This makes me sad though. The SSD I have is an OCZ
Yeah, guess I didn't mention that setting it up properly with WinXP was a drawn-out process. I had to reinstall the OS to use AHCI mode, otherwise it would BSOD instantly. I don't know how much worse the performance would be without all that, since I did the special formatting / alignment thing and enabled AHCI mode before using it much.
Now when loading Civ 5, instead of having a black screen for about 3 minutes, now it's more like 15 - 20 seconds.
Heh, my SSD is an OCZ also. Oh well, the failure modes for an SSD aren't too bad. Though I guess with a magnetic disk the control board could get totally fried and the disk would still be readable (just replace the control board).
Oh btw, stuff isn't done blowing up around here yet. Today our refrigerator started putting out a nasty burning rubber smell. No prob, got ice and a big cooler and a cheap fridge on the horizon, but holy shit, heheh.
Memblers wrote:
Oh btw, stuff isn't done blowing up around here yet. Today our refrigerator started putting out a nasty burning rubber smell. No prob, got ice and a big cooler and a cheap fridge on the horizon, but holy shit, heheh.
See, what I mean :/
Hope you get over this "stuff breaking apart" phase soon, it is always a pain.
I recall one time where both my PC's motherboard and Power Supply broke at once. A week later my cell phone had spasms and turned off randomly.
When it rains, it pours....
qbradq wrote:
This makes me sad though. The SSD I have is an OCZ
Wow, I really jinxed myself on this one. My friggin' OCZ SSD just crapped the bed last night.
Did it have the problem where it turned into a 4GB hard drive named "JM Loader 001", or is it something else?
No. It had the problem where I turned my laptop on and the BIOS didn't recognize it anymore. I tried it in two other systems to make sure the drive was dead, and I've put a HDD in my laptop and re-installed Windows on it, so I know the SATA controller isn't dead. I am RMA'ing it now. It's only four months old
Man, that's total crap. Usually I expect stuff to fail a lot sooner than that, 4 months is enough time to get comfortable with it. My OCZ drive is a Vertex 2, what was yours?
With my "failing" HD (haven't RMA'd it yet, still worked last time I tried it, and the Seatools diagnostic program is worthless because it won't test it) I was able to copy everything off without losing anything.
A while back I started using this "MozyHome" backup program, the free version of it will backup (I think) 2GB remotely. Only annoyance is that it sometimes pops up saying "your files have been backed up" if it think the computer is idle, which tends to be when we're watching netflix or something. Worth it though to me to know if my house burned down or my PC got stolen, at least I'd still have my projects.
The only HD I ever lost was a 120MB one a long time ago, I actually had my first NES hacking attempt on it, where I modified the source code to Mouser. For some reason I had posted it to Usenet once, thus later on I was able to request it and actually got it back (the ROM, at least). That HD too later on I managed to make an image of 80% of it, and from that used a music-ripping program to rescue a whole lot of stuff I made in Fasttracker 2.
Memblers wrote:
Hey, just wanted to note on here (rather than send out a bunch of PM's and posts everywhere), that I'll be out for a week or so. My PC decided to start biting it (HD failure signs, then seemingly a videocard failure).
I feel your pain, man and have been through a couple of hd and/or other failures over the years. It sucks epically. Eventually had to retire my first computer that you and I built over that one christmas, felt bad putting it down for good.