dreaMING of Fusion

I have just bought a new Caviar SE 250GB EIDE harddisk. I am quite satisfied with it. It run quite and cool just as advertised at it's website . hddtemp shows 34°C when it is under light loading while my room temperature is 30°C: $ hddtemp /dev/hda /dev/hda: WDC WD2500JB-55REA0: 34°C It is currently cooled with a standard 5cm case fan. Even without the fan it seldom reaches 40°C. Anyway, these are some performance numbers which is pretty average and definitely nothing near high performance drives like those 10,000 rpm Raptors $ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 174 MB in 3.03 seconds = 57.48 MB/sec $ sudo hdparm -T /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 1172 MB in 2.00 seconds = 585.58 MB/sec BTW, I have now switch to Kubuntu (yeap, I prefer KDE compared to gnome). I have been using many different distros in the past from Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake, Red Hat 9.1, openSUSE 10.0, then SUSE 10.1. All of them are uses Red Hat/RPM based package management. ...

Arg! There are dozens of bad blocks in my root partition and it does not boot properly anymore. It is a Maxtor 80GB HDD about 3 years old. This is the first time I had such a serious problem in my 12 years of experience with computers. I have help many people troubleshoot their computers with bad sectors in the past but this is the first time it happens to me! I have always kept my harddrives cool with a cooling fan. Well, this Maxtor drive is not really mine, it was my girlfriend's. Last year, I bought a 160GB drive as I needed a new drive for Linux as my old 4.3GB is aging and getting slower but still no bad sectors! And, since I don't really need so much space while my girlfriend always complain that she does not have enough diskspace, so we swapped. She has a laptop and the 3.5" 80GB HDD is in an external USB/IDE enclosure that was not too well ventilated compared to my other older 40GB drive that is still running well. Therefore, the lesson learnt is: KEEP YOUR HARDDR...