Re: hardware doctors!

[Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com>]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Jim Blackson wrote:

> "Weird noises" usually means the drives are failing or have failed... 
> Replacing the drives is sound (but not noisy :-) advice.  

  When I noticed last spring that the ATA drive in my mother's machine
was making strange noises, I immediately went out and bought a
replacement.  I managed to get everything transferred over to the new
drive - thank God - and got it properly installed in the place of the
old one.  When I started the system up from the new drive, there was
THE SAME NOISE!!!    

  My question is:  how can one of those little tiny fans in the drive
cooler unit make _that_ much noise!??!$#!?  It never occurred to me 
that it could be that. Oh well.  My father's box now has a 6GB backup
drive, which he's delighted with.  All's well that ends well, I guess.  

  More seriously: does anyone have any idea if cold temperatures
(paradoxically) could be a cause of drive failure?  I've had a couple
of IBM scsi drives - otherwise pretty reliable - fail within the first
year in conditions where the ambient temperature was between 0 and 10 C.

Dennis McMurchy, 
Sointula, B.C. / Tojinmachi, Fukuoka
Canada           Japan