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At 12:45 PM 8/11/2005, Gary Udstrand Poked the stick with:
As I posted on this forum a week or so ago I I built a SN25P with the
following components:
1) Shuttle SNP25 barebone
2) AMD64 3700+ San Diego
3) 2G of OCZ 184pin DDR400 Unbufferred with Copper Heatspreader
4) Sapphire Raedon X800XL 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
5) 74G Raptor SATA150
6) 2x250G Seagate Barracudas SATA150.
I was hoping that this PC would be fast, dependable and reliable. For
the first couple of weeks I had no issues and everything worked
swimmingly. Not even a hint of a lockup or a blue screen. Nothing.
Then a couple of weeks ago the PC started locking up with no real
pattern, or reason. As the lock ups became more frequent I became
concerned and when the system started blue screening I started to
suspect a faulty component and/or heat. As suggested in a previous
thread I ran memtest86 for 72 hours straight and found no memory it
seems to have eliminated memory as the cause.
Since the memory was not an issue I started to look for other causes.
Taking the cover off I found that the Raptor drive was very hot to the
touch (mounted in the forward drive bay across the top). Not having a
Raptor in any other system I was unsure if the heat was normal or
excessive. Either way I thought the air flow would be better in the
rear bay so I went ahead and switched locations with the Barracuda that
was already occupying that slot.
Following the swap I ran a defrag on the drive and things seemed OK, for
a couple of hours anyway. It again started with the lock ups and blue
screens. Since I was getting errors reading system files I ran chkdsk,
which found and repaired some errors. I decided to re-install the OS
(XP Pro). It took me several tries and reboots to "successfully"
re-install XP. When it was completed I once again rebooted the system
and things seemed OK. As before, a couple of hours later the same
problems started occurring. On a whim I decided to pull the Raptor
(well, disconnect it anyway) and instead install XP on one of the
remaining Barracudas.
Since doing so the system has been up and running for a couple of days
with no issues. I have not run any burn in tests (any recommendations?)
on the system but the results are encouraging. The stability (and even
the performance) has returned and things at this point seem fixed
(fingers crossed). I am unaware what it is about the drive that may
have caused this issue. While the system definitely runs warmer with
the Raptor the temps inside the chassis never exceeded 40C and the CPU
never exceeded 50C (according to SpeedFan). I guess it is possible that
the drive itself simply overheated and/or it has a intermittent faulty
component. Or it could be a Power Supply issue.
At this point I am planning on RMA'ing the Raptor but I am not sure if I
should put another Raptor in this system or if I should get another
Barracuda and install that in its place.
Could the Raptor be the root cause of the problems or is it more likely
that it is just part of the symptoms? Is it possible that the cooling
of the SN25P is not substantial enough to have 2 Barracuda and a
Raptor? PS issue?
I have seen posts from people who are running Raptors in the SN25P with
success. I have not however seen anyone else mention whether they had
other drives as well, let alone two Barracudas. Hopefully I have
corrected the issues with this PC but it would be nice to know if the
installation of another Raptor would cause the issues to return. If it
is a PS issue I guess another Barracuda would just as easily cause the
same problems. Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome.
--
-Gary
Tallyho ! ]:8)
Taglines below !
--
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
