Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

Not overly sensitive. I worked I.T. at my visual effects school, and drive failures were a common complaint. Because the drives are portable, they are moved more, and in general stay warmer, and so are subject to the kinds of things that reduce drives' lifespans. A single drive is more reliable than a Raid-0 setup by a factor of 2. Raid-0 failures on the OS partition are extremely difficult to troubleshoot, because you can never tell what caused your bluescreen. (Failure due to system drive vanishing = no logs.) Failed raid-0 partitions are more difficult to perform file recovery on, because the recovery software has to support raid, and you may have to know the settings that were used to create the array for the software to figure anything out. (block size etc.)

The implementation of Sata and of Raid has little to do with it. The very concept behind raid-0 makes it less reliable. The best thing an implementation choice could do is not drop the array on a failure. Which would be great, but there's no way to test for it, you have to ask the people who designed the chip or find someone who's getting bad sector warnings on their raid-0 in windows. I expect most raid-0 controllers would drop the array, otherwise one drive could continue writing while the other has stopped, and corrupt more data.

Anyway, I have a suggestion for people who do want raid-0. And there's no doom here, I have a raid-0 of four Raptor drives (reliability divided by four) that's lasted since 2003. If you want raid-0, be aware that there is a 2-to-4 month hump of drive failures to get through. I'm not saying it's a likely event, it's just that given any new drive, there are sometimes defects that manifest over time, and these tend to cause more failures around 2-4 months. So be safer with your data during that time. Once you've been using your drive for 6 months, you're pretty much in the clear for the next 3-5 years. You're past the manufacturer defect stage, now it's just gradually wearing out over time.


Since we're talking about reliability of spinning drives, here's a suggestion that's not often repeated. While your drive is spinning, it is essentially a gyroscope. You can feel this on any active external drive, by the strange forces when you rotate it. Rotating a spinning drive causes forces on its spindle, and depending on the health of the bearings, could cause slight shifting in position of the platters. The tolerance between the platters and the read heads is essentially zero, though I believe they are designed to safely touch each other nowadays. Point is, if your laptop is running, don't pick it up and flip it under your arm and run off. (Unless you have an SSD!) Reasonably slow motions are fine, just don't whip it around, and be aware your torso rotates from side to side when you walk. Most of the drive failure incidents at school seemed related to how exactly they had used the machine while they had it.

 

This is interesting.

So Intel's Matrix RAID comes standard with the M6400 Vista Ultimate 64-bit?

Once an app is loaded it is in memory and the HD speed is a mute point. Therefore have OS and apps on RAID 1 for safety. Yes, boot time and initial app loading will be HD speed dependent. But once all loaded it is mainly RAM access dependent.

Put all data files on RAID 0 for speed and back up RAID 0 on regular basis.

I would assume all OS virtual memory and program cache and temp files should point to the RAID 0 for faster access. Including hibernation. (Of course only data files on RAID 0 would be backed up!)

With 2 x 250GB 7200rpm partition example would be:

HD1 (150GB) and HD2 (150GB) as RAID 1 (C and D drives) for OS and apps. Total unique storage is 150GB and everything is automatically backed up (dual copies of OS and app configuration).

HD1 (100GB) and HD2 (100GB) as RAID 0 (E: drive) for all data files, OS virtual memory, program cache, temp files, and hibernation. Total unique storage is 200GB.

Advice/comments welcome. By the way thanks to everyone who has posted on this topic. I think many have gained from this.

By the way how much space needed for Vista Ultimate 64-bit, MS-Office Pro, CS4 Master Collection, WordPerfect Office X4, CorelDraw Graphics Suite?
I need about 50GB for my own less common apps, so that leaves about 100GB for the above plus other small apps.

% performance gain with the above config?

 

The newer prebuilt external drives from Seagate and Western Digital do not operate on the "USB Mass Storage Device" driver. You will see something else recognized on plugin. They do this so that they can have their fancy LEDs that flash in patterns, far as I can tell. I've had contact with all of these drives in person and seen it. It became an issue because I help administer computer labs where the users don't have admin permissions.

If you have an older drive, like a few years old, you might not have it. If it's new, then look on the root of your drive, with Explorer set to show hidden files and protected operating system files. You will probably see an autorun.inf file. On some drives, the autorun.inf only seems to load an icon. However, on those same drives, I was seeing a folder structure with more autorun stuff including drivers. BTW - you can open the autorun.inf in a text editor and read its contents.

Basically I was trying to figure out why these particular drives from Seagate and WD could never be ejected by the user. ("This drive cannot be safely removed at this time.") As a troubleshooting step, I tried moving the autorun.inf. The drive suddenly was no longer recognized when plugged in! (This was the drive that only showed the icon in autorun.inf, but it had a second autorun in a different folder, with drivers.) We tried a few different machines, no luck. I downloaded and installed some Seagate software on that lab machine, and the drive again became recognized. I then put back the autorun.inf and I haven't heard of any more problems from her drive.

This autorun structure seems to be present on all new Seagate and WD drives I've had contact with at the school, about 6 different drives representing both manufacturers, mostly bought in the last 1.5 years. The Western Digital drives I've seen directly reference an executable in the autorun.inf, so I am positive they are installing user-mode WD drivers.

This is less of a problem on your own machine, if you don't mind installing utilities from every manufacturer you buy a drive from, but I feel safer if my drive works over the standard "mass storage device" driver. The reason is, I might not always have admin permissions on the machine I'm using, and autorun.inf tends to play nasty with that. If you are admin on your machine, the process is completely transparent. (Except that one file delete can mess up your drive until you install the software.)

My recently bought 1-TB drive from Buffalo, ironically a completely nonstandard 2-drive raid external, does not have any of that and works on the USB Mass Storage driver. I've had no contact with other drives from Buffalo, so I can't say if that's the case in general.

The issue with warranty was that I tried to do file recovery for a student as a favor, and suspected the enclosure hardware was dying, but could not remove the drive for direct access because it would void the warranty. She was actually bitten by that 3-month failure hump I mentioned in another post about raid... lasted about 1.5 months, then started getting rapidly expanding bad sectors and filesystem corruption. If that had been a homebuilt enclosure, there would have been no issue.

As far as the quality of enclosures, I have never seen one that didn't have the drive screwed down into the same board as the enclosure hardware. You can't just get the cheapest one you can find, it will be like something you found in a Happy Meal. Get it locally so you can see it, or from a site like newegg that offers customer reviews. For sata+usb you get a very wide selection. Fry's is a bad idea for enclosures far as I can tell; it seems they save costs by buying cheaper components, and the enclosure I bought there has been the only one I've had that does not hold the drive in a satisfactory way.

You can also apply foam tape to keep things in place, that's what the "real" manufacturers do anyway.

 

Crud... that is just so weird...are you really sure? My drive's not that old. I want to say I got it last year? (Maybe this year, but I think it was last year).

It's just using the USB Mass Storage driver.

Mine definitely didn't have that. I wiped the drive as soon as I got it, and I've even got it encrypted now.

What I don't understand is how what you're describing is even possible. If it needs special drivers to work-how does it even see the drive to install the drivers to begin with?

Well mine can't, at least from Windows Explorer. It shows up just like a normal hard drive, with no eject option.

I'm not sure why that is-if somehow it's telling Windows that it's a standard hard drive, or what.

Wait wait wait...I'm reading through more of your post, and I'm wondering, what if it DID install special drivers when I first connected it, and it still has those on there? Hmm...now I'm wanting to experiment. I wish I had a second Windows computer here to test this with...

If this is the case, it's unacceptable to me. I do NOT want to run any special drivers (although to be fair, if I am, they've been flawless, but...)

I had a spare drive lying around, and saw a sale on Antec's cheaper enclosure. I normally love Antec-and in fact the USB bridge works great...but there's enough room in it for the drive to slip out of it's connections. Took me a while to figure out it was that simple for why my computer wasn't seeing it.

This is really, really disturbing/weird news about the special drivers thing...

My drive is just exactly like this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148235
except it's 250GB instead of 500.

As near as I can tell though it's just using built in Windows drivers. I'd stick it in a different computer that it's never been connected to to test if I had one handy here :-/

Edit: Yeah, mine is definitely just using the regular mass storage drivers from Microsoft. Only odd thing is you can't eject the disc from Windows Explorer, but you can from the "Safely remove hardware" thing.
(Well, now my drive is encrypted so you can't eject it like normal anyway, but...)

 

Thinking of saving some $ buying 2 HD's.
Unfortunately no 500GB 7200rpm HD's available.

These are $100 at newegg:

Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

HITACHI Travelstar 7K320 HTS723232L9A360 (0A57547) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

Fujitsu MHZ2320BJ-G2 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

Any performance, heat, noise preference?

Would prefer to have 100% DELL configured but 2 of the above HD is $800 vs $200.

 

I was just looking on Newegg, and had my mind blown by a 320GB, 16MB cache, 7200RPM Seagate drive only costing $100. I had NO idea they were that big, let alone that cheap now.

Last time I really looked, it was more like $200-300 for a 200GB 7200RPM drive, and they were SUPER rare.

 

Yah I bought an external FW800\USB2 cage to place the original SATA drive from my MBP in it. With this new laptop I'm looking at increasing the space to one full TB of storage, but at that size I NEED data security so I've been eyeballing RAID 1 cage solutions on its own sep UPS
I'm just saying for people not willing to roll their own the total solution options out there from Western Digital, etc that have FW800 and ESATA are generally more expensive then just USB. Part of this is licensig for FW800 and its hardware. Most ESATA setups I've seen also come with FW800.

 

If you look in the deals thread, you can get the (awesome) Hitachi 7K320 320GB 7200RPM drive for about $61 after live cashback and MIR.

 

Well, chances are you're okay then. When my friend's drive got recognized by windows, it showed a different driver that was brand specific, in place of "usb mass storage device".

I've been trying to figure this out myself. My friend's drive definitely could not be recognized without the autorun files on it. Maybe I am remembering wrong, and it was her WD drive that became unreadable, and the Seagate just had trouble safely removing? I was doing both drives at the same time.

One or the other definitely had that problem though, because I really freaked out after I'd moved that file and the drive stopped recognizing, and I remember downloading the drive utilities got it back up and running immediately.

It's entirely possible that there is something about the original partition that confused the computer, and that wiping it sort of "pre-solved" the problem for you. In fact, when doing recovery on new drives, I frequently see something very strange - My recovery software recognizes a single contiguous FAT32 partition starting at the beginning of the drive, but ALSO a small HFS+ partition a few megabytes in, -inside- the FAT32 partition. Maybe they are hacking things to get macs and pcs to read correctly, and need their autorun to prevent pcs from getting confused.

Whatever they are up to, your Seagate is nearly identical to the drive I was working on, so if you have gotten it working by first formatting it fresh, I believe you and take that as good news!

What you do is find the "safely remove hardware" icon in the system tray, LEFT click it, and click on the drive letter. You'll want to do this every time you remove it, because otherwise the following things happen:
- A "drive in use" flag remains set, and a macintosh computer might refuse to mount the drive under certain conditions, saying you have to connect it to your PC and eject it correctly.
- The drive's write cache might not have been flushed, and the filesystem could become corrupted.

It's entirely possible! At the labs at school, the students using these drives do not have permission to execute the autorun so it launches and fails partway through. Some computers actually reboot themselves the second the drive is plugged in. (This happened with U3 thumbdrives also - remove that crap!) This was limited to exactly TWO computers in one of the labs, out of 120 total. I bet someone with the correct privileges just happened to plug the right drive into those computers, for class, and installed drivers that mess up the autorun. It turned into a full fledged, full time research project requiring our dept. to buy portable drives to fully figure out, so we just gave up.

This is my feeling exactly, but it does only become a real problem if you don't have admin on your machine, and it sounds like Seagate is much more cool about it than WD.

Are you sure there are not screw hole mounts you aren't seeing? This doesn't sound like something Antec would do.

Thanks for sharing! I bet I got my friend's WD drive and Seagate drive confused. I'll switch from warning about all externals to warning about WD... I've had contact with several WD drives and know for sure that they have an executable in the autorun.inf. I do know my friend had trouble safely removing the Seagate though. (This girl has an anti-hard drive aura surrounding her, I swear...)

Now that I think about it, I remember being angry about it when I found out, and telling my friend that her drive stopped working because WD wanted to have their funny cyborg-style back-and-forth animated eye LED. I don't personally own any of those model drives, so I'm limited to what I remember from helping students with at school... So I jumped to a conclusion about the Seagate! Sorry bout that!

 

Correct, but it also swaps unused active programs to disk if RAM gets tight. So you can see an additional benefit when going back to, for example, Maya, after spending a long time in Photoshop. Most people like the small speedup to app loading you get from Raid-0. (including me... ) The apps will NOT load in half the time though, due to many factors.

Agreed on all points, especially hybernation. (Hybernation is one of the few times you get full performance boost from your raid-0!)

I will have to try this utility... it sounds great!

Trivia about software RAID - because the OS can be aware of the volume arrangement being used, it can use them more efficiently. According to a conversation I had with the IT Director of my school, software RAID beats hardware most of the time. BUT - in a full-on professional data center application, with multiple machines and hundreds of drives, it becomes too difficult to maintain and suffers from usability problems related to the need for 100% uptime.

Interesting... So your "Raid-1" volume would actually be two separate drive letters, that are kept in sync at all times? In that case, I'd maybe map the second drive to something like "Q:" to put it nicely out of the way. (Q: because some things mount drive letters starting at the beginning, some mount them starting at the end.)

If you are leaving your Raid-1 drive for apps, I'll suggest your size based on the computers at school because they are LOADED with software. Next time I'm there I'll see if I can figure out how big the program files folder is. I can say though that many of them only have about 80 gigs for programs AND user folders for ~60 users at a time. I think your apps / OS drive is very safe at 40 gigs.

Also remember, you can choose any location for your app installs! I would be installing apps to the RAID volume, and keeping your files on the Raid-1 instead. The apps are expendable, you can reinstall them. What you don't want vanishing is your project files!

You can also remap your user folder location, fyi, to put your desktop and 'my documents' on a different drive.

Well, hey what the heck... I'll plug in the old system drive from when I had my 8710 and look for ya. This system had been configured for use as a full-featured mobile 3D graphics workstation, and used for approx. 3 weeks, before sending it in to fix a screen defect. (Aaaaand it never returned.)

I don't yet have Adobe CS4, but I do have CS3. I did not install the stupid parts, like Contribute and Version Cue. My Adobe CS3 folder sits at 5.3 GB on my XP machine, 4.7GB on my laptop. (Was probably more conservative with the installer on the laptop.)

Vista Business X64:
Windows: 20.0 GB (There MUST be something wrong here!!! But that is the size!)
Adobe CS3: 4.7 GB
Program files in general, (all of them): 34.3 GB (this includes 5 games, Bioshock, Morrowind, San Andreas, Tron 2.0 and STALKER.)
Program files, NOT COUNTING games and Adobe CS3: 34.3 - 4.7 - 24.7 = 4.9 GB
Users folder: 30 GB

The Users folder probably has some large stuff that I should have gotten rid of... had the laptop come back from service. For programs, this has two versions of Maya, Mudbox, ZBrush, Corel Suite 9, Blender, Mathematica, and misc. other supporting stuff most of which is small.

The 20GB Windows folder seems to be mostly in a folder called "winsxs." Which I read as "win sucks." The contents are incomprehensible and total 12.2 gigs. System32 has 3.5 gigs, and the rest are spare change.


All that said, I would suggest this setup:

OS and Users folder: Raid-1
Some application installs: Raid-1
Most application installs: Raid-0!
All cache, hybernation, Adobe cache, hybernation: Raid-0


OR this setup, which I think is perfectly safe and gives maximum storage.

OS and Users folder: Disk 1, Partition 1
Toy partition for storage, backups or maybe other OS installs: Disk 2, Partition 1

Then make Raid-0 of partition 2 of both disks. Install most apps and cache there!

The only problem with Raid-0 is for an OS partition, and how the RAID system might respond to bad sectors or a drive timeout. Single drives don't have that problem. (Consumer drives "take a break" every now and then under certain circumstances... for calibration or data checking, or whatever... timeout is a worry if the controller isn't very patient.)



In case you're curious, this is the system I use at home, built in 2003 and still chugging:
OS and user folder: Single disk: 60 GB
Selected apps and volatile workspace for video editing etc: Raid-0, 4x WD Raptor: 137 GB
Long term storage and secure backup: Raid-5, 4x 200GB standard drives: 600 GB
Disk for a toy gaming OS for messing around: 200 GB single

I built it in response to a really bad drive failure. Since then the Raid-5 has saved me from losing data twice.


Extra bonus tip for reading this gargantuan post (sorry I tend to be wordy): The fastest transfer rate area of your disk will be the BEGINNING. The first two thirds of the disk are about 35% faster than the last third, on average. Choose from there, do you want your OS to load faster by being at the beginning of the disk, or do you want your Raid-0 to perform faster, by putting you OS at the end? (For me, OS would go at the end, because it only loads once!)