Chkdsk vs. Chkntfs?

[Rob]

UPS might help, but I've had somewhat bad experiences with UPSes in the past, so I'm not really ready to go down that road again. My system is a somewhat unusually power-hungry system, there's a 650W PS inside it, but it may just be barely enough to power all of the stuff inside it. Besides the mainboard and processor, there is six internal hard drives, a video card, and a couple of optical drives. Plus there are various USB hard drives and other peripherals that get attached and detached from it from time to time. It's more of a server really than a standard desktop.

Yousuf Khan

If you are only getting the message on one particular drive, I would
tend to suspect the drive itself or cables running to it, although
the system drive does so many extra writes compared to data drives
that you may be right in it being power issues - just that they
haven't affected writes to data drives (yet..)

It might be worth looking at which drives are sharing PSU power
cables and changing them around. I usually share the system drive
power harness with optical drives only, and the other (data) hard
drives share a different one.

What make/model of PSU do you have in there? As I'm sure you know,
many of the cheaper/unbranded models have wattage ratings which are rather
higher than they are actually capable of for sustained use.
If it helps, I've found Corsair PSUs to be ultra reliable and deliver 'what
it says on the tin' when it comes to power rating.

As far as UPS's go, they also clean up a dirty mains supply, so can help
with spikes and brown-outs.

Cheers,

 

[Paul]

Yeah, the shear number of electrical devices hanging off of same wall
outlet is high, and there aren't enough other wall outlets nearby, so a
lot of powerbars coming out of the same outlet. The machine acts much
better when fewer USB peripherals are connected to it.


It may not be the power itself is browned-out from the electrical
utility, but the power draws are large in that particular area of my
house. I've rarely experienced a power outage here, last one was maybe 5
years ago, so the UPS's battery tends to die out well in advance of the
next power outage.

Yousuf Khan

There are at least five architectures of UPS. This is the article I used
to recommend as a backgrounder.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090521041358/http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/SADE-5TNM3Y_R5_EN.pdf

This article simplifies things a bit. Read only the first three pages.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02492972/c02492972.pdf

If your line voltage is perpetually low, you want the "line conditioning" function,
which is the next tier above the basic "standby" UPS.

Another consideration, is whether your ATX power supply has active PFC. Active PFC
modifies the current flow waveform. And I've been unable to find a good article
that analyses what happens to Active PFC, when it hits a non-sinusoidal waveform.
If I had to buy a UPS today (and had the money), I'd try to get true sinewave
output, so that I'd no longer have to be worried about whether a new ATX
power supply had active PFC. I've been careful to select power supplies
without PFC function, and I know the ones I've got, are not suffering
on account of my stepped sine UPS. On my UPS, the only time the stepped
sine output appears, is when it switches to battery. The rest of the
time, a relay passes regular wall current (that's why my UPS is always
ice cold to the touch). A line interactive one, has a more complicated response,
and does more messing around with the AC presented to the equipment.

Paul

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

In message <[email protected]>, Paul <[email protected]>
writes:
[]

<<snip>>

Generally, slapping capacitors on DC power conversion devices, is not
recommended.

Sorry, that was a throwaway line; I think because of the physical size
required, not to mention the impracticality of getting sufficiently
low-impedance (i. e. thick!) connections to the various rails, I doubt
it would be practical anyway.
[]
Protection of the supply from the effects of the big capacitors could be
achieved with suitable filtering (starting with series inductors, which
would be bulky anyway [I'm an electronic engineer BTW]), but as you say,
this really isn't the way to approach this particular problem; from
Yousuf's further descriptions, it does sound as if his PSU isn't quite
up to the job. (Possibly extra inline filtering on the feeds to some of
the drives - but a bigger, or perhaps more conservatively-rated, PSU is
really the way to go.)

 

[Philip Herlihy]

I'm using the licensed Macrium Reflect as my backup and imaging app. I
found it good enough to upgrade from its free version.

Yousuf Khan

Sure, but does this tool monitor the health of your disk and flag up
alerts when appropriate?

 

[Rod Speed]

Yousuf Khan wrote

Gene E. Bloch wrote

Some people just shouldn't be using modern appliances like cars.

Now we can design them so that even those
can use them with better warning messages.

One lady I know, bought an expensive car, but never could even be bothered to learn how to operate the rear window
defroster on it. One day she showed up at the airport after a severe ice storm and had a full layer of ice caked on
the back window with no way to see out of it. I asked her why she didn't just hit the rear window defroster, even if
she couldn't be bothered to scrape it off by hand. She said she didn't
know where the button was, nor that she had such a button!

And its now possible to design a car so she doesnt need to know.

Another lady, who I didn't know, but she was stuck after snowstorm,
and she was in a Jeep. We were helping her try to get out, and then I
asked her if the four-wheel drive system on her Jeep wasn't working?
She asked what's four-wheel drive!?

And its now possible to design a car so she doesnt need to know that either.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Sure, but does this tool monitor the health of your disk and flag up
alerts when appropriate?

Not really something that I'm looking for in a backup/imaging utility,
as I have Hard Disk Sentinel to do that for me.

Yousuf Khan