Ok, guys, I'm putting this out here because I've never seen a problem like it before.
I have a dedicated vid edit box. The other day, I was converting video (straight conversion from *.avi to *.mpg, no rendering) and both hard drives died, at the same instant.
Background: I'm a hardcore geek with 2 years college EE, been building systems professionally for ~10 years, and troubleshooting them far longer. The system in question is as follows:
Athlon C 1.4Gb on ECS K7S5A, 512MB Micron DDR-2400, Matrox G-550, Matrox RT-2500, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, PC Power & Cooling Whisper 400, GlobalWin WBK-32 w/7k Delta
Drive configuration is:
System Drive: Maxtor MX4D060H3 (60Gb, 5400RPM) on secondary master
Plextor PX-W1210A CDR on secondary slave
Video Drive: Western Digital WD1000BB (100Gb, 7200RPM) on primary master
Creative DVD-1610E DVD on primary slave
The system had all the latest patches and all BIOS' were current. It had ~200 hours on it when it expired, had performed flawlessly up to that point, and gave no indication of any problem. When the crash occurred, it spontaneously rebooted, and BIOS couldn't find the hard drives. I've swapped mobos, CPU's, PS's, cables, and drives. The drives are definitely dead, the rest of the hardware is definitely good.
The system is also sharing it's surge protection with an identical computer set-up as a w2k file server, identical that is, except the file server is running a 1gig Athlon o/c'd to 1.33, and a generic TNT-2. The server didn't even hiccup, so I think a spike is highly unlikely.
Has anyone ever seen a similar failure? If so, do you know what caused it, and if not, can you make an educated guess? I'm fresh out of ideas...
I have a dedicated vid edit box. The other day, I was converting video (straight conversion from *.avi to *.mpg, no rendering) and both hard drives died, at the same instant.
Background: I'm a hardcore geek with 2 years college EE, been building systems professionally for ~10 years, and troubleshooting them far longer. The system in question is as follows:
Athlon C 1.4Gb on ECS K7S5A, 512MB Micron DDR-2400, Matrox G-550, Matrox RT-2500, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, PC Power & Cooling Whisper 400, GlobalWin WBK-32 w/7k Delta
Drive configuration is:
System Drive: Maxtor MX4D060H3 (60Gb, 5400RPM) on secondary master
Plextor PX-W1210A CDR on secondary slave
Video Drive: Western Digital WD1000BB (100Gb, 7200RPM) on primary master
Creative DVD-1610E DVD on primary slave
The system had all the latest patches and all BIOS' were current. It had ~200 hours on it when it expired, had performed flawlessly up to that point, and gave no indication of any problem. When the crash occurred, it spontaneously rebooted, and BIOS couldn't find the hard drives. I've swapped mobos, CPU's, PS's, cables, and drives. The drives are definitely dead, the rest of the hardware is definitely good.
The system is also sharing it's surge protection with an identical computer set-up as a w2k file server, identical that is, except the file server is running a 1gig Athlon o/c'd to 1.33, and a generic TNT-2. The server didn't even hiccup, so I think a spike is highly unlikely.
Has anyone ever seen a similar failure? If so, do you know what caused it, and if not, can you make an educated guess? I'm fresh out of ideas...
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