The Curse of the X15s

[Sengar]

Okay, I am officially a very unhappy camper. I put together a MSI Pro2-a based 1.2GHz Athlon system within the past few weeks, and picked up two Seagate X15s to go with it. The first one I received was DOA - the drive was powering up, but would hang on the BIOS screen every time (Adaptec 39160). The second one worked great - for about three days. It was busy encoding in Flask MPEG when I received a BSOD in Win 2K (kernel failure); after rebooting once, Windows was no longer able to write to the drive. The drive then timed out while verifying media in the Adaptec BIOS, and I've not been able to get it to work -at all- since then. It sounds as though it's spinning up when I power on the system, and suddenly dying out, a process which keeps repeating itself. Exactly the same way the first drive behaved.

The cable that supplied power to the drive was also split to two 80mm front case fans. Is there any way this could cause a problem? It was the only free power cable that would reach (Antec 400W power supply). The drive cable is an U-160 compliant nine position twisted-to-flat terminated PVC cable I picked up from Hyper Micro. It hasn't been used for anything else other than the two accursed X15s.

I have two Cheetah 18XLs connected externally to the same channel - the X15s were the only devices I've internally connected to that channel. Also, there was an 80mm intake fan directly in front of the drive, so cooling shouldn't have been a problem.

Basically, I'm looking for a reason that this could be my fault, since it seems odd that I would get two bad drives in a row, after 10 years of never having a single problem with any Seagate drive I've owned. Am I cursed? Are the 18XLs ganging up on the X15 out of jealousy and beating it into submission while I'm asleep? Should I be fashioning a helmet out of aluminum foil rather than writing this message?

I suppose it is possible that, since both drives came UPS 2nd Day Air, they were beaten around too much in shipment. At this point I am seriously considering a refund rather than a replacement, but I really did like that drive when it was working. I even enjoyed the spindle whine.

 

[mastertech01]

I have experienced problems with fast drives, especially SCSI drives when power was not fully allotted to them.. I have used one branch from the power supply dedicated just for the 2 hard drives ever since I discovered this and have had no further problems...

 

[Sengar]

I've tried both drives in the Ci3520 external enclosure I keep my 18XLs in (after having problems), and this did nothing to correct the issue, so if it's a power supply issue it would have had to cause a permanent malfunction with the drives - I wasn't able to get either of them to work even with a dedicated external power source.

One thing I did notice about the X15 that was (temporarily) working - it made an almost constant clicking noise, in approximately 1.5-2 second intervals. I attributed this to the drive's acoustics, but in retrospect I wonder if it could have been symptomatic of a problem with the drive mechanism. The only files on the drive were video files that I was editing and encoding, as I wanted to thoroughly establish it's reliability before using it as a boot device.

 

[mastertech01]

I have a pair of IBM GXP75 61.4GB IDE that did that untill I gave them plenty of juice.. now they have ceased to make the noise and are happy.. Pretty much the same for my IBM U160.. they were power hogs.. but you may simply have defective drives.

 

[emjem]

Call Seagate. Sounds like bad hdds.