Hello from Adam in NYC The lifetime of a hard drive is pretty dependent of how well it was installed. After years of doing refits and running Linux, you notice a few things. Heat kills drives. Some drives like Maxtors like to run hot and loud. If you don't properly ventilate, some drives just either get sick or just quit. Reisefs likes to work best with drives with large caches. I have been running with laptopToshibas with 16M caches and does it run stable and fast. 9.3 Reiserfs is sensitive to flawed hard drives. Upgrading to Reiserfs on SuSE 10 seems to be a wise choice if you value your flying data. Don't trust fsck. Test the drive out thouroughly. Backup first and see for yourself. Good luck chasing the gremlins. Adam in NYC -----Original Message----- From: Carlos F Lange <carlos.lange@ualberta.ca> Subj: [SLE] frequent hard disk failures - 9.3? Date: Thu Nov 3, 2005 10:56 am Size: 1K To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Hi, Since I upgraded my 2 PCs at home and 9 PCs at the university to SuSE 9.3 (clean install, all partitions ReiserFS) I had 4 hard disks either crashing or showing bad sectors. In all cases the failure is (I still need to confirm one case) hardware related and there is no apparent pattern: they were Maxtor, Western Digital (2), and Seagate disks, EIDE and SATA, new and old, on Intel and on AMD boards, so I can't pin the blame on any particular brand or type. But I can say that it is definitely an unusually high number of hard disk failures. Since I am one of only 2 in the department running SuSE and my colleague also had a hard disk crash while running 9.3, whereas the rest of the MSerfs (and a couple of Mac addicts) in the department may have lost one HD in the same period, it is starting to look bad. :( I wonder if it is just here, or if someone else also noticed higher number of crashes. I remember a previous thread from July, where people tried to blame ReiserFS and others convinced them it was mainly hardware. Well, hardware seems to be the case here, but then again, SuSE and ReiserFS were the only things in common among the 4 failed HDs I had in the past 4 months. Am I seeing things, or what? Carlos -- Carlos Frederico Lange -------------------------------------------------------------------- Scientific Programmer: professional who loves to _find_ own errors. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com