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Old January 21st 14, 02:22 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware
Paul
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Default Putting a WD2500JB IDE on my XP PC

W. eWatson wrote:


I made a mistake earlier. I said the D: drive was empty. It contains my
CD player.

As an experiment, I fired up the PC with the WD2500JB and waited 20
minutes to feel the three HDs for heat. Only the WD2500JB IDE was quite
warm. The others were cool. It's about 55F in that room.

I was tempted to put a WD5000AAK8-00H8A0, a C-drive from another XP PC,
from another XP in the tray, but the heat anomaly caused me to pause for
the time being. I have a 120GB D: drive there I might try. BTW, after
5-10 minutes on that PC both drives were cool.

I have a 8.4 G WD28400 EIDE and placed it in the tray. When I booted, I
found it on my G: drive, as a slave. At least something works!


Do you have some air movement over the drive ?

You know, at one time, the power footprint of drives was in
the 30W to 40W range. Some hard drive carriers back then,
had three small fans on one side, blowing air across the surfaces
of the drive. To remove that ridiculous amount of heat. Some drives
had extreme operating temperatures, but it didn't matter because they
were designed that way.

The drives today are much lower power. But you still can't
run the drive in an insulating blanket. There should still be
some air movement.

Modern drives, have S.M.A.R.T . And the drive has a thermistor
located somewhere in the unit, to measure the drive temperature.
You no longer have to "feel" the drive to detect overheating,
as you can read out the drive temperature via SMART. If you're
reading 60C, that would spell serious trouble. My drives
right now are at 31C (below body temperature).

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

That utility will allow you to read the temperature. There are only
a couple models of drive, where the drive parameter includes
something claiming to be temperature, but the drive just reads out
a fixed (bogus) number. Most modern drives have a working thermistor,
and you can watch the temperature rise after system startup. As well
as see a slight increase when doing sustained reading or writing.

If one drive jumpered as Slave works, and another drive jumpered
as Slave does not, you might suspect the non-working drive is
defective. I'm not really all that crazy about the design intent,
but IDE drives will not respond if they're sick. As an engineer,
I'd rather see the controller board *always* respond to a software
probe, even if only to say "I cannot read my firmware off the platter
and bring the drive up to full functionality". The unfortunate design
choice is, to instead leave users guessing as to whether they
made a jumpering mistake, a pin is broken, or the drive in fact
is just plain defective.

Since the flooding event which cause production problems, some
IDE drives "magically appeared" in retail sales. We can interpret
this a couple of ways. The plant in Hungary was making drives
again (new production). Or, the manufacturer pulled all the spare
drives of unknown quality, out of reserves and put them up for
sale. Those would be the drives used for warranty returns.
As long as you have a warranty on that drive, and test
it promptly after purchase, you have two parties you can go
after. With a 30 day return period at a retailer, you may be
able to do a regular return to the store that sold you the drive.
If you have to go through an actual warranty claim with
Seagate or WD, that's less likely to leave you completely
satisfied.

Paul
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