Replacing ailing hard drive

[cgallery]

Don't forget the fan in the power supply, and sometimes there is a chassis fan hiding in the front between the metal case and the outer plastic cover.

And video card fans, they're notorious.

[milanuk]

Actually... all the other fans seem to be hanging in there pretty good. The drive temp started up a bit as AVG thrashed the snot out of it doing a deep scan; hadn't been able to complete that before - drive temps hit 63-64°C and/or the system would lock up. This time the drive got up to 48 and is cooling down nicely now that the scan is over. No other noises noticed.

The power supply fan, case fan, and cpu fan all seem to be working as advertised; the video is on-board so I don't believe it has a fan of its own... though I might be adding an aftermarket video card in the next week or so which probably *will* have one...

Thanks,

Monte

[LinuxRandal]

Actually... all the other fans seem to be hanging in there pretty good. The drive temp started up a bit as AVG thrashed the snot out of it doing a deep scan; hadn't been able to complete that before - drive temps hit 63-64°C and/or the system would lock up. This time the drive got up to 48 and is cooling down nicely now that the scan is over. No other noises noticed.

The power supply fan, case fan, and cpu fan all seem to be working as advertised; the video is on-board so I don't believe it has a fan of its own... though I might be adding an aftermarket video card in the next week or so which probably *will* have one...

Thanks,

Monte

My brother has a system that either the CPU fan, or power supply fan are weak, but not dead (still spinning fast enough he can't tell which is bad). A trick that has prolonged him, he sticks a box fan on it, and force feeds it air. I should have mentioned that PRE cloning, but I was at work. Remember that for next time, if your drive temps are rising, it can give you a little more time.

[milanuk]

okay, just for the edification of those who said it was a fan... you were right

I've been sitting here today trying to get a new video card to work... suddenly the grinding noise started again. Seeing as how the old drive was unplugged, I was reasonably certain that wasn't it... turns out the power supply fan was howling like a banshee. As luck would have it, I had a spare fan on hand (the 80mm fan I purchased from Staples was too small to fit the mounting holes for the case fan) so I pulled the power supply apart and replaced the fan. Works great, no noise! I still think something was going bad on that HDD, as the temps on it were going thru the roof on a fairly regular basis - but it ultimately was *not* the source of the noise that started the hunt

Unfortunately it appears I might need to replace the power supply entirely... the 'little' 300mw PS may be stretched a bit thin with the new 500gb HDD, the existing DVD and CD-RW/DVD-R drives... and the new graphics card. So back to the store I go...

Thanks,

Monte

[cgallery]

Unfortunately it appears I might need to replace the power supply entirely... the 'little' 300mw PS may be stretched a bit thin with the new 500gb HDD, the existing DVD and CD-RW/DVD-R drives... and the new graphics card. So back to the store I go...

Thanks,

Monte

Modern drives don't need many watts. I'm looking at a stack of 750GB drives that need .6A at +12v, and .65A at +5V. So about 11-watts each.

Most people go WAY overboard w/ power supplies. More important than size is the quality of the supply.

[milanuk]

Hmmm... I was going by the assumption that a) factory power supplies are almost always on the wimpy side and b) adding a high-end video card w/ its own fan, etc. and whatever power it draws might mean its time for a somewhat bigger PS. Then again, I remember when 300w ps *was* big... I see ones now in the 450 range... good god, what do they have in there? An on-board refrigeration unit?!? (don't answer that, I've seen some of the whizz-bang over-clocker cooling units, so I was only partially jesting).

I decided it would be a good time to upgrade the video card... the onboard Intel graphics adapter was the only thing holding me back from playing a game someone bought me for a present last year. I was kind of out of the 'acronym of the day' club of PC hardware, so the first trip netted me an nVidia 6200 AGP card, on the recommendation of the person @ the store. Got home, nope, not AGP, looks more like what they call PCI-E nowadays. Go back, spend some more money, get a nVidia 8500 card. Should be good to go until this 'puter falls apart. Only problem is now I have a chicken-n-the-egg scenario. Windows doesn't have the drivers for the card, so upon reboot it gets past the splash screen, then goes black. Force the video back over to the onboard chipset, try to load the drivers - program won't play along as now it can't 'see' the card as being installed because I had to force it off in the BIOS. The workaround seems to be to install the card, unforce the BIOS, boot into Safe Mode and install the drivers. Only problem: Safe Mode hangs on a file (acpcpq.sys) indefinitely - from searching it seems to be a common problem, and not many of the fixes apply to my situation. Tried a System Restore to sometime last week... boy that screwed things up like a soup sandwich! Finally got that sorted out (sort of) by booting from the original overheating Western Digital HDD.

I decided it was way over-due for backing up to an external drive, so I went and got a Maxtor OneTouch 500GB, and am backing up the C:/Documents and Settings directory as we speak. I think after that it might be high time for a bare-metal scrub and re-install... the only pisser is that this computer came w/ a generic 'System Reinstall' CD, not the full installation media. I'm digging around for original install media for my other programs just to be sure... Maybe I'll get lucky and not have to go that route, but I'm kind of leaning that way.

Monte

[BobSch]

More important than size is the quality of the supply.

Absolutely! A cheap power supply is right behind cheap memory when it comes to causing those impossible-to-find intermittent problems. I've built several machines and have never had a problem with supplies from PC Power and Cooling http://www.pcpower.com/products/ . They ain't cheap, but they're rock-solid.