sad history of failures. whats wrong with me

[BZ]

I've had 2 hard drives and 4 cd burners fail, in different computers over a couple of years. The hard drives both came back to life (amazingly) and report no problems in WD diagnostics, but I don't trust them. The cd burners slowly burn more and more coasters until I can't use them anymore. Some of the CDs I thought were good are unreadable. Of about 500 CDs burned probably about 100 coasters.

Does this sound like normal wear and tear, or like I'm doing something wrong? Heat? Static shocks? too much disk activity from downloading too much? bad luck? here's the sad history in detail--

In my old dell P3(both computers run Win2000, IIS, SQL Server, Newsbin, Nero, Eudora. No viruses ever)

• hi-val / mitsumi (?) 1x cd burner- worked well for years, then started making coasters.

• teac scsi external 4x cd burner- made about 50 cds for me then coasters more and more frequently. Gave it back to my brother who says it works fine to this day.

• WD 60gb external firewire hard drive- worked great for 1 year, then made click of death noises and wouldn't spin up on several attempts. eventually I removed the firewire case and installed it in IDE and now it works fine!

new PC I put together (P4 2.4, Asus p4pe, 350w power supply)

• TDK veloCD 40/12/48x- 10-25% coasters from day one as well as burns that it says were fine but fail the data verification. RMA'd. TDK confirmed it was bad and sent me back what appeared to be a new drive although they said it was just fixed. It did ok for a while but now is totally worthless and out of warranty. It can still write occasionally but can't read anything, even what it just wrote.

• New WD 80 internal HD (in a removable drive enclosure) a few months old- no problems, then the other day clicks of death and it's not recognized on reboot. I left it alone for a while and now it's fine.

Any ideas?

 

[buleyb]

A few....

just try a LiteOn CDR, like $47 from newegg, and they work nicely.

the removable enclosures might be building up too much heat from the drives. are they plastic or aluminum/steel?

perhaps the whole case has an airflow problem. Leaving things alone, that start working again later is a good sign of heat.

 

[buleyb]

oh, and what weather/climate you in?

 

[BZ]

well its hot here now, no doubt, but these problems span a couple of years, so its been cold and hot. motherboard temperature is usually around 95F, but I don't know about the drives. I got another fan and spread my drives around so there is an empty bay between them all. The plastic drive enclosures have little fans in them, but the firewire one didn't.

I guess my real question is whether all this sounds like a related set of problems, or just a bunch of coincidences. I don't want to buy another burner, even a cheap one until I figure out what's wrong - and I also want to figure out if I can trust those 2 WD hard drives.

 

[thorin]

Sounds like a problem between the chair and the keyboard

Thorin

 

[BZ]

oh, you mean my wristrest! I thought it might be that!


but really I agree - I'm sure it's me doing something stupid that no one else does, but what? I was hoping this pattern might sound familiar and specific. Do other people's CD burners fail slowly after 100-200 burns?

 

[buleyb]

have you tried sticking the burner in a friends machine?

 

[sunase]

I've burned 1000's of CDs without a burner dying so I suspect it's not common. Regarding discs dying, make sure you buy decent media. I once bought a bulk pack of 200 of the cheapest I could find and every single one died in a few months compared to it rarely happening otherwise (I always verify each burn completely in Nero and never burn at high speeds since I store so much).

HD wise make sure they are being properly cooled and not overworked (ie. do not have 12 simultaneous P2P sends going off the same drive 24/7 on top of your other wear and tear). Consumer drives are really not designed for 24/7 heavy use. Always make sure you get a 3-year warranty on new drives.

 

[snailophone]

Originally posted by: BZ
oh, you mean my wristrest! I thought it might be that!


but really I agree - I'm sure it's me doing something stupid that no one else does, but what? I was hoping this pattern might sound familiar and specific. Do other people's CD burners fail slowly after 100-200 burns?

Well, I have a cd burner that had like a 3/5 burn failure rate. It was pretty much a coaster factory. What I did was pop the side of the case off, tilt the tower against my desk, and stick a desk fan (set on HIGH with the blade guards removed) right up against the chassis. I have had a grand total of 2 failed burns all year. In short, it is most likely a heat problem.

 

[Mday]

what power supply do\did you use? are you using a surge protector or a UPS? how is the power in your home? what are your case temps? how is the air circulation? do you smoke or have an otherwise dusty environment?

 

[BZ]

dust - some but not a lot
smoke - no
UPS / surge - no
psu - the one that came in my cheap case - channel well atx 350
the only temps I know are mobo ~95F, and CPU ~105, which seem pretty consistent, although CPU goes up to like 120 doing anything hard.

since the consensus seems to be heat, I'll try putting in an intake fan in the front between the hard drive and the burner and getting all the cables out of the way

I guess the answer to "what's wrong with me?" may be "I hate air-conditioning".

thanks for the help everyone