Number 208 - September 2000

Hard Disk Tips
by Chris Doyle, Ontrack System Engineering Supervisor Published www.TUGNET.COM
1. The silent killer of hard drives is heat -- especially high speed SCSI drives. I would recommend using a hard drive-cooling fan with all hard drives. www.3dfxcool.com sells them and you can also buy them from FRY's. I have cooling fans for both my IDE and SCSI drives. In the lab, we have cooling fans on the drives at all times.     2. Optimize your hard drive on a daily basis. As much of a pain in the butt as this may be for some, optimizing your drive has several benefits. Besides optimizing the files, this process also catches many minor problems that may manifest themselves as a major problem later. Examples are cross-linked files, or orphans. Another good reason is if you do have a problem accessing data on your drive when a utility is run, such as Norton, Nuts and Bolts, Tiramisu, etc., the chances of recovery are much higher if the drive has been optimized recently. (By the way--Mijenix makes a great utility to perform this function )     3. I would also recommend running Spinrite on all of your drives once a quarter--at level 5. This is a personal recommendation; Steve's utility is excellent, and will find many if not all surface defects before they manifest themselves further. TIP IT is also and excellent tool for Zip disks.     4. Should I mention backing up your data on a regular basis???     5. Power--I want to mention that it is not too difficult to tax a power supply in some systems if they are fully loaded. If possible, I would recommend making sure that the systems have a decent power supply. PC Power and Cooling makes the best (250+ watts) and the hard drives have their own independent power connection, not shared by other devices. A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) is also advisable. They are much more reasonable than in the past.     6. On the issue of keeping your computer running all the time, or turning it off and on, here are my thoughts. My recommendation is turn your computer on in the morning, and off at night. I would also recommend disabling all power saving for hard drives. No use in having them spin down every 15 minutes of inactivity and waiting a minute to spin up. This is like tuning the computer off and on.     7. Another suggestion (I think we are all guilty of doing this) is never move the computer while it is up and running. Try telling that to laptop users. Any blow to the computer--it tips over, it is dropped an inch or more--gets transmitted directly to the hard	drive, and in most cases it will cause a minor head crash. In worse case it will cause bad things to happen.     8: Don't forget about static [electriciy] when handling drives--the newest and highest performing drives come with Giant MR heads, which are extremely sensitive to any static. Ontrack has redone all of our static procedures to handle this technology, and I can tell you from first hand experience that static will kill drives dead.     9. Drives that make clicking, thunking, grinding, etc., are experiencing mechanical problems of some sort. Each time that the drive is powered up, more damage is occurring on the drive. The less you do to the drive, using utilities, etc., the more data we can recover.     10. If you think you have a problem with a drive, you can try going to the Web site of the manufacturer of the hard drive, and download a specific utility that they make to check the drive. These utilities, since they come from the manufacturers themselves, can check all kinds of manufacture specific issues with the drives. Examples are as follows:     Quantum--has a utility called QDPS     IBM--has a utility called DFT     WD--has a utility called WD Diag. I think they are updating the toolset     Maxtor--has a utility called MaxDiag.     Ontrack's Data Advisor will work with all drives, by the way. It is probably the safest tool to use to check a drive.     11. Here's a tip for those who do a lot of testing with drives. by installing a particular operating system, file system type, System Commander, etc. In many cases, they are very hard to get rid of. When booting up with Disk Manager, there is a utility that will write zeros to every sector of the drive. This puts the drive back into the way it came from the factory, and after this is complete, it is easy to partition and format. Don't forget this will destroy all information on the drive.     12. For all of you SCSI users, driver and bios updates for your SCSI card can make a big difference in how your drive performs. Don't forget to make sure you follow the specifications for cabling and termination.     13. Make sure that you have a good anti-virus product, and update the signatures on a bi-weekly basis.
Number 208 - September 2000