Hard drive sluggish at bootup

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Avder
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Hard drive sluggish at bootup

Post by Avder »

Hi everyone

Recently one of my hard drives has been giving me some trouble. At bootup, when the drive detection process begins, it detects the first drive and then on occasion it hangs for a while at the second drive, giving up after about 15 seconds and moving on to the third drive. If I 3-finger-salute during this hang, the detection process goes completely fine, with all 3 drives being detected just fine.

If all 3 of the drives were stand-alone I wouldnt really care, however all 3 are part of a RAID-5 array, and it took forever for the damned thing to rebuild.

All 3 of the drives are the same model: WDC WD5001AALS

Just wondering if I should just get a new drive and replace the problematic one outright, or if theres something else I can do besides never turning the computer off?
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Grendel
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Post by Grendel »

I used to have the same problem w/ a P5W DH Deluxe mainboard. It never was a problem after the machine booted. IIRC it went away after I updated the BIOS. But then I also swapped out the drives at some point in time, so if there's no BIOS update for your MB I would swap the drive out.
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Avder
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Post by Avder »

I'll look into a bios update sometime. For now I'm just hibernating the computer instead of using sleep so I can make sure the problem drive is detected when it turns back on.

8 gigs makes it take a while tho...
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Avder
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Post by Avder »

Just to update, the hard drive in question died completely tonight after a brief power outage. Hooray for running on one less drive :/
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