I seem to have luck like the Seti servers......they just luv to fail on the weekends...........

I don't know anything about your local environment, or about the US electricity supply industry, but .... you've worked on electrical distribution, so this story may ring a bell.

I once did some contract work on a site which operated 7 days a week, but was situated in a small industrial park where most of the tenants only worked 5 day weeks. I noticed that we were getting a lot of alerts from the UPS (APCC) monitoring software.

So I looked at the electrical supply voltage in more detail, and found that it was set close to nominal for business working hours, but rose significantly higher in the small hours of the morning and at weekends.

We had a lot of hard disk failures on that site too, but they were el cheapo 40GB Maxtors in Dell small form factor cases with limited cooling (Optiplex GX50/60). I don't think the example translates exactly to the Frozen Penny!

Well, my voltage monitor (yes, I have one...) is showing 117vac right now......certainly within spec......
It stays pretty stable......so I don't think I am having any trouble with the mains.........

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

So far, so good.
Got my daily driver de-bricked and it is crunching again....

Now if I can pick up a vid card and figure out if that's the problem with the OTHER rig that died last night, I'll be back up at full Seti crunching power.....

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Seagate? I've heard of them, but never used them - didn't like the name! I've used Maxtor for the last 10+ years or so and never had one fail. There again, they don't get the (ab)use and I probably wouldn't want to buy a Maxtor drive built in recent years! I now use Hitachi SATA 500 GB drives and they are superb....yep, IBM sold their drive business to Hitachi - enough said.

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Don't take life too seriously, as you'll never come out of it alive!

I've used Seagate drives since I built my first rig.....
And this is the first time they have ever let me down......
Guess I'll know better in a few weeks if these new ones are gonna give me trouble or not........

If they do, I'd probably give Hitachi a spin....hope I don't have to go there though.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Quite honestly, Mark, if you do need a new drive, the Hitachi drives really are good. Obviously, I don't have one that has been running for X years continuously, but the Hitachi drives 'feel' right. Believe me, they're a long way from the dreaded 'Death Stars' from the IBM days.

My kindest regards to you, Mark

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Don't take life too seriously, as you'll never come out of it alive!

I actually do like the Hitachi drives. Yes I have had 2 out of 12 fail on me, but the first was a doa that was replaced on the spot. The 2nd, well let's just say that I don't like the warranty game that being played. But overall I am happy with them.

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Mark, you should also consider SSDs. Yes, they are small in capacity and expensive but SETI@home does not need that much disk space, does it? Vista, BOINC and SETI@home. I think 20 gigs is enough for them.

Just my 2 eurocents...

Henri.

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Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition <-- Sign this, please.

Hey Mark I feel your pain.

I lost 2 seagate 300Gig'ers in a linux rig a few months back.
(didn't have a lot of drivers etc to load so the rig was back in a flash). Strange since
I bought those drives from Fry's at the same time. Anyway I will say Seagate with the 5yr
warranty worked out for me very well. Knock on wood all my crunch rigs have Seagate drives
in them (save the 5 HP DL360s) - in all my tinker time those are the only two seagate drives I lost.
Back in the day those deathstars sure gave me fits (lost over 5 of them over time as I recall, but the
price back then sure was good) Now if the SSDs from Intel would just drop in $$$.

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Hey Mark I feel your pain.

I lost 2 seagate 300Gig'ers in a linux rig a few months back.
(didn't have a lot of drivers etc to load so the rig was back in a flash). Strange since
I bought those drives from Fry's at the same time. Anyway I will say Seagate with the 5yr
warranty worked out for me very well. Knock on wood all my crunch rigs have Seagate drives
in them (save the 5 HP DL360s) - in all my tinker time those are the only two seagate drives I lost.
Back in the day those deathstars sure gave me fits (lost over 5 of them over time as I recall, but the
price back then sure was good) Now if the SSDs from Intel would just drop in $$$.

Hey......I got almost 72 hours on these babies now........LOL.

But these suckers DO run hot..........

I am not really excited about SSD's yet......cost is too high for the capacity available.......the 16 gig flash card in my digital cam could put a really big dent in some of them really fast.........

And what does the speed really do for ya? Boot into 'Doze quicker? Big whoopee......it don't crunch Seti any faster.........

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster