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Western Digital Caviar 21200 going bad?

I mean what should I pay nowdays, I'd want a western digital caviar drive around the 1-2gb range. they just rock, and I love the sounds they make.
 
They should not be expensive at all and should be very easy to find.

Here is one for $5 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Western-Dig...Internal_Hard_Disk_Drives&hash=item27c6a8966f

Another impressive sounding drive (but without the performance to back it up :P ) are the Quantum Bigfoot drives. I hated them when new (was like a hard drive for the unemployed :P) but now days I actually really love how loud the head movements are.
 
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I still have a bunch of the Bigfoots--4, 8 and 8GB capacities. They aren't fast, but for me they worked really well and very reliably.

I'd always considered them (and the Caviars) to be pretty much silent in comparison to the 5¼" FH hard drives--some of which are loud enough to interfere with your concentration.
 
Aren't the bigfoot drives like 5.25", but its more like quarter height or something like that? I wouldn't have a clue as to where to put a drive like that in my computer, since the 2 drive bays are filled with cd-roms :P
 
Yeah they're 5.25", maybe 1/3 height but really take up a half height bay.
Just grab another 3.5" drive for $5-10, will be sweet as.
 
Wait, how is that? isn't the voice coil the cause of the singing? don't MFM hard drives use stepper motors for the heads? or is it the spindle that does that? hmm...

yeah I think I'll save up for a similar WDC drive.
Yeah, this kinda sucks, cuz I'm sort of attatched to this drive, this computer doesn't sound right without that certain HDD in there... oh well, better get used to it.
 
Well, I got home and decided to start playing around with the hard drive.

So I stuck it in another computer, where the drive would have a vertical orientation (with the plugs facing up), and it started up with a regular seek test, no clicking, so I restarted it like 3 or 4 times and it had no klink sound. so then I went ahead and hooked up the ide cable and stuff up to that computer (a P3 emachines eMonster). I tried running some tests in a program called PCPRO, and the failed on this computer, and some even resulting in the click of death... scared the shit out of me. so I restarted the computer and it works again. then the pcpro made it do the click of death again.

So then I went back to my Pentium computer, where the drive would have a horizontal orientation and plugged it in, and it hasn't done the clink since, and I've rebooted this thing like 5 times. I ran PCPRO again and it passed all of the tests that it failed while in the vertical orientation, and now its just sitting here running as it should. but the seek test takes a tiny bit longer than usual to complete, not as in slower, but longer.

This is making me curious... and still no bad sectors...
 
Tr3vor said:
I was gonna take it apart and take a look, but I don't have the right screwdriver for it, and none of the sockets for my dad's ratchet will fit inside the small holes for the screws.
Click to expand...

You can buy thin walled socket drivers. I just took a regular one and ground it down a bit so it would go in the hole of a model M. A cheap one from the dollar store is probably easier to grind and nothing lost.
 
Looking inside wont tell you anything btw, any faults will be invisible to the human eye and then it likely wont work when you put the cover back on (depends on how dusty the room is and on how dependant the drive is to the torque on the cover/headstack screws). Opening a hard drive is something you do when it's 100% buggered or you really don't care about it.
 
He's talking about my IBM Model M problem ;)

the only hdd I'd take apart is a 100% click of death victim with no hope of survival. I wouldn't take this WDC apart even if it did have the click of death.
 
oh whoops, nevermind me then, I wasn't here :P

I have a keyboard drama also - been putting it off - my plan is to replace the cable and if that fails, try and replace the chip, if that fails I'll just go cry.
Hopefully yours is just the cable or a dodgy connection.
 
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