Saturday 24 February 2018

WD Disk DOE & Dust....

I recently ordered a new WD Blue disk, it duly arrived and had the strangest problem I've seen in many a long year, no matter what I did the disk showed as 64MB total and it lost all data upon power cycling.

I puzzled over this briefly, until I pulled the disk back out the caddy and saw it had exactly 64MB of cache, yes, no platter space was being shown, just the cache showing up as disk space.  I have never ever seen this before, cache has always been a transparent intermediary for me in production and so to suddenly have the cache being the only exposed space was odd.

However, dead on arrival hard disk, a quick RMA and a new one winged its way into my hands, they actually gave me a slight upgrade as I got a WD Black by return of post.

Tonight I planned an hour to fit the new disk and add it to my workstation.... This machine has no cable management, and its a nightmare to add drives, there are six built in 3.5" bays but they have a set latch and screw mechanism, which forces you to fit the drives to that the power connectors are actually straining the distant power plugs. (I do plan to buy a pair of SATA power extenders on pay day).

What struck me as a massive problem however, is the amount of dust inside there.  Clearly, since fitting the 1080 GTX I've had something change or fail or open as there are copious amounts of dust in there.

Now my work area is not optimum for a workstation, I have a full tower case, so it has to go under the desk and the floor is carpeted.  Now this had been mitigated by the Coolmaster Cosmos 1000 case having lifting rails, taking the whole thing 1.25" off of the floor level, and two ground level filters, as well as a rear and front filter set.

But clearly things have not gone well, as just dust dust dust.

My original plan for the start of the year was to re-case the server, then re-case this PC as a server as well, retire one of the aging DELL 2950's for this machine itself, and put myself a new workstation together for my 40th.

Trouble is?... I'm skint, like proper skint, so I can't afford the workstation I was planning on...

And now I need to sort out this machine... I smell another re-casing task a head... Hmm, which case?  I'm thinking about the Corsair Obsidian range... Anyone have any other suggestions for a full height tower?... 1 x 5.25" at least 6 x 3.5" internal mount points and at least 2 x 2.5" mount points internally.  Front Panel USB would be a boon.

Dust seems to be my enemy.

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