Re: [ccp4bb]: External Harddrive (FireWire) problem

[Robert Esnouf <robert@strubi.ox.ac.uk>]

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Hi,

This may or may not be relevant...

We use many maxtor drives for cheap RAID (as well as
firewire). There is apparently a potential issue to do
with vibration or magnetic fields causing bad writes on
good disk sectors that subsequently report as bad - too
many of these and the drive reports a failure.

There is a solution which is to put the drive on a PC
and run a utility from the Maxtor website called 'wvset'.
This causes the drive to read every sector it writes and
if there is an error it rewrites it. There is a small
penalty (~8%) in the raw disk performance, but I'm told
that the apparent reliability is dramatically increased.

(Another utility pwrdiag can be used to re-certify an
apparently bad disk... this is a low level format and
check and in these cases will report a good disk.)

Robert


-- 
Dr. Robert Esnouf,
The Division of Structural Biology and
The Oxford Protein Production Facility,
The Henry Wellcome Building for Genomic Medicine,
Roosevelt Drive, Oxford OX3 7BN, UK

Emails: robert@strubi.ox.ac.uk   Tel: (+44) - 1865 - 287560
     and robert@esnouf.com        Fax: (+44) - 1865 - 287547