Still having problems with Cube Hard Drives

[Randy Spencer]

It's been almost a year since I got the power button problem fixed on my
Cube fixed and I have now tried 5 different hard drives as potential
upgrades to my stock Cube.  All of them WD or Seagate 80 gig drives except a
WD 120 gig I got in the last few weeks.  Every single one of them exhibits
the same symptom.  They install flawlessly, run the OS for quite some time
(days) and then choke.  Usually they freeze the system followed by have
progressively more and more problems recovering from the crash until the
drive will no longer boot.  The drives often will make a knocking sound when
they cannot boot.  I even get a circle with a diagonal bar thru it
(universal "No") symbol when it get's this bad, I have never seen this boot
icon on Macs before.

Now the weird part:  If I take the drive out, put it in another Mac and run
First Aid on it (from Disk Copy) it claims no problems and the drive will
come right back up when put back in the Cube.  Sometimes all I need to do is
remove and reinstall the drive to get it to work again.  I have tried
leaving the case off and was able to recover the drive once by simply
unhooking the power and data cables and plugging them back in without
unhooking anything else.

The original 20 Gig that came with the Cube works just fine all the time,
except it is always full.  I can leave it running tests for weeks without a
problem.  It is also not a heat problem as the Thermoindock claims the
ambient temps are identical using all of the hard drives (20c to 40c). 
Could my power supply be too wimpy for the big drives?

Anyone on this list live in the East Bay of SF?  I would love to loan you my
hard drives to test for a few days...

  -Randy





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¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º° 
Randy Spencer (510) 769-1949 AIM:RanSpen Citrus Insight #5427
 http://geocities.com/israndy

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