Odd.....huffyuv's killed my hard drive

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 5:18 am

Keeper of Hellfire wrote:
Castor Troy wrote:I had a maxtor back in 2002 and it died within 3 months.
Don't scare me. I bought a Maxtor 3 months ago.

I have a 120GB Maxtor HDD in my Tivo that runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and 366 days on leap years. I added it to the original 30GB that came with the Tivo 4 years ago and it still runs perfectly. I think the only major manufacturer I haven't owned is Seagate. My first computer came with a Western Digital (120MB?), I stuck with them (400MB) until I purchased the first of my 2 Quantums (20GB, both). When Quantum got purchased by Maxtor, I started buying IBM (20GB). Then I bought the Maxtor for my Tivo and later another Maxtor (80GB) for a spare drive that sometimes goes into my external enclosure. Between the 2 Maxtors I purchased a Western Digital (120GB). Lately, I've been buying Hitachi HDDs (200GB, 250GB), which is like buying IBMs again since Hitachi took over IBM's HDD business.

My brother has owned mainly Western Digitals (13GB) and IBM (40GB) / Hitachi (200GB). The only disk to fail him was an old 700MB Fujitsu, long, long ago.

Xarathion · Post by **Xarathion** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 9:10 am

Keeper of Hellfire wrote:You aren't supposed to convert entire DVDs. Make only short clips. If you're not sure what clips to use, then keep the VOBs on your HD and convert the clips if you need them.

I'll keep that in mind next time.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 11:26 am

Xarathion wrote:
Keeper of Hellfire wrote:You aren't supposed to convert entire DVDs. Make only short clips. If you're not sure what clips to use, then keep the VOBs on your HD and convert the clips if you need them.
I'll keep that in mind next time.

Nah, nothing wrong with converting entire dvds. Its way better if you have the space. Unless it kills your drive :p

Keeper of Hellfire · Post by **Keeper of Hellfire** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 1:32 pm

Zarxrax wrote:Nah, nothing wrong with converting entire dvds. Its way better if you have the space.

It may depend on the NLE, but I found it easier to cut the clips with VDM, going that way only one time through the footage than to start for every scene from the beginning. In addition, if you have a weaker PC, it needs much time to convert whole DVD's.

Sir_Lagsalot · Post by **Sir_Lagsalot** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:03 pm

Keeper of Hellfire wrote:
Castor Troy wrote:I had a maxtor back in 2002 and it died within 3 months.
Don't scare me. I bought a Maxtor 3 months ago.

I've got an 80GB Maxtor HD in my computer that I bought over 4 years ago, and it has yet to give me any problems. I did have an 40GB Deskstar HD that died on me after 2 years though... That would have likely killed Lagarith in the bud if not for the fact I was able to use a Linux rescue CD to boot long enough to copy the source code to a floppy.

I guess the moral of the story is a) your harddrive probably won't fail anytime soon, b) back up any important files on a second HD/CD/DVD/web site on a somewhat regular basis just in case, and c) I like telling stories.

DJ_Izumi · Post by **DJ_Izumi** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 8:59 pm

Don't AVI's go apeshit if you go over 4GB? And I can totally see him stupid converting the entire episodes to lossless without breaking it into chunks being what screwed up his hard drive,

Keeper of Hellfire · Post by **Keeper of Hellfire** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 6:35 am

The version 1 AVI had several size limits, depending on the access method 1, 2 or 4 GB, version 2 hasn't that limitations if your drive is NTFS formatted.

Coderjo · Post by **Coderjo** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:11 pm

The drive was already dying, from the sound of it. Don't delete or add anything. Copy any critical data off now. Then get Maxtor's diagnostic utilities and run the full test on the drive. It will likely report bad sectors. This is most likely bad, as drives should be able to re-allocate bad sectors into the reserved space. If it couldn't do this, it probably ran out of reserved space. If the diagnostics report an error code, and the drive is still under warranty, you can RMA it to Maxtor for a replacement.

I avoid Maxtor as much as I can. I had a RAID 0 setup with 2 maxtor 120GB drives in my editing system. Suddenly, I started to get write errors from windows, and each time I did, I would run the diagnostics. They would find bad sectors and ask if I wanted to repair them. I'd say yes, boot back into windows and go back to whatever I was doing. Then one day, the drive died COMPLETELY, taking with it all 240GB of data in the array, which included 15 hours of captured footage. I sent the drive back and got a replacement. The drive they sent me started crapping out a year ago, and I immediately backed up the data, broke apart the RAID array, and removed the dying drive.

A word of advice: make sure to keep your hard drives cool. If you don't they will likely get pissed. The faster the drive spins, the faster it will heat up, due to friction between the platters and the air inside the drive case. (What, you didn't think there was a vacuum in there, did you?)

Xarathion · Post by **Xarathion** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:11 pm

I reformated and reinstalled last week with multiple partitions this time. Everything's working fine...

Coderjo · Post by **Coderjo** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 3:46 pm

I still say you should run the manufacturer's test utilities on the drive.