Friday, August 17, 2012

Bleeding drive crucial saga

I seem to be improving :-)

A health issue I've had for over a year now is that some wounds I've picked up have been refusing to heal. That's not good. The diagnosis last year was ulceration and infection but ... I'm hoping now that's a conclusion based on incomplete data.

What I did was look up and research "diet skin repair" (or something similar) because I suspected that with my horribly bad diet, I was missing out on crucial minerals needed for my body to repair itself. Basically, by neglecting eating my greens and by going away from habitually drinking orange juice, I'd got to a point where my body had run out of the stuff it needs to keep it intact.

After a week of shifting the diet a bit again, things are looking promising again today :-) Although I'll keep an eye on it over a weekend where I can wear shorts all the time. The skin is still weak and shorts mean that trouser material won't damage it.

Now that's out the way - techie stuff !!!

Been researching that again today because the desktop PC is still sick. It would boot up fine initially but after "a while", it would crash hard and wouldn't work after a reboot. Turn the PC off and on and it's fine.

Researching "Crucial M4 problems" quite quickly gets you seeing stories about them failing after 5100 running hours. How long is that ? It's 212.5 days or roughly 7 months. That's spookily about right for how long my desktop has been active. Looking with that DiskCheckup utility I linked a few days ago, the run time is about 5240 hours (if I'm reading the numbers right).

What's the known issue ? They'll go unresponsive after an hour of use, leading to the machine crashing. Powercycling the drive will fix it. (That's consistent with what I'm seeing)

What's the fix ? Update the firmware. I'm on that - I'm currently doing disaster prevention by copying all files on the SSD to another drive in the machine. The firmware in my drive is version 0002 and needs to be 000F.

I usually avoid updating firmware like plague - it's a very risky thing to do and should be unnecessary. One false move (like having the drive die halfway through cos of it's 1 hour limit) and you'll end up with something less use than a brick.

It's been a saga ... But it's good to have it confirmed that Crucial are a responsible and quality bits manufacturer. Other SSDs have been bricked completely by firmware difficulties and one reason I went Crucial is because they didn't just go sheeplike and clone everyone else's drive.

One reason Gigabyte and Acer hit my blacklist a good few years ago was that they didn't have that responsible attitude to making quality bits (now forgiven). The GA5AX motherboard for my K6iii was based on an Acer Labs chipset which had software which was ... incomplete. I'm not sure if that firmware was ever fully developed. On motherboards, which form the foundation stone of all PCs, that's almost unforgiveable.

Crossing my fingers that I've got it right on this one. Returning hardware is always a pain, especially if it's a problem that couldn't be recreated in store without waiting an hour for the time to tick over. Novatech would be find with returning hardware ... it's just time and hassle to get the drive to them and back on top of annoyance of having to get a new drive up to speed.

It would cut into cricket watching time !

So - crossing my fingers that :

My legs continue to heal themselves
That I can resist the compulsion to scratch them (own worst enemy)
My drive has the known issue with those Crucial SSDs.

And ... it's just crashed again after roughly 1 hour of use. It's not nice to have a problem. But it is nice to see confirmation of symptoms that lead you to a possible fix for that problem.

Closing out - if you're putting together or buying a PC and have free choice over what to get, here's what I think with the knowledge over the past week :

Laptop - use a hybrid drive. Conventional discs are too slow, SSDs are lightning but not big enough. Laptops rarely give you room to fit more than one drive, so Hybrid drives aim to give you the best of both worlds. My laptop isn't as quick as my desktop now - but it's smoother than it was before the swap.

Desktop - plenty of room here, use a SSD boot drive and a conventional drive for data. There's all sorts of advantages to separating out Windows from the data. It's easier to back up if Windows is separate but that's insignificant next to the performance gains from separating them out. If Windows is on the same physical drive as data, it has to go back and forwards across the disc to read what it needs. Caching should cut down that time but caching has been broken in Windows for many years now.

Even doing something like switching to my 74GB WD Raptor (conventional but less slow) drive for Windows, combined with the 1.5TB drive for data, would lead to big performance and smoothness gains by eliminating all that seek time.

2 comments:

  1. Not healing? Have you been tested for diabetes?

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  2. Have been - but ages ago ...

    Came out ok then for the diabetes potential. Might be worth getting checked again though if eating more Green Stuff doesn't sort me out :-)

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