B+W rev1 G3 IDE issues - solution?

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Hello everyone! I've been a long time reader but never actually had an account here or posted, time to change!

thought I'd let everyone know about my B+W rev1 G3 IDE experience, as I'm sure most of you are aware there are issues with these machines and newer drives, well I may have found a work around by using old style 40 wire IDE cables instead, I've got 2 machines that have been up solid for nearly 2 weeks now, one of which is serving a 24/7 webcam feed fomr Apache and show NO HDD CORRUPTION AT ALL, and this is on machines that previously were having issues within 10-15 mins of booting!

I've posted my experiences in my Blog (www.rabidwombat.co.uk) but ideally I'm wondering if any of you out there with rev1s could verify that it works for you too! I've only got 2 machines to test with but it seems to have worked on both.

If you need any more details on specs etc then please let me know but would be nice to know if it works for anyone else!

Thanks a lot!
Matt
 

dtravis7


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Interesting find. I might give it a try on my old Rev 1 B&W. I have this 20GB WD drive that corrupts within a day or so every time I use it on my REV 1 B&W. I am sure it has a 80-Wire cable. Worth a shot.

Only other fix is a PCI IDE controller card.
 
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thanks!

that would be great if you could try it!

I'm more than aware of the PCI card way around it but why spend if you don't ahve to!

It really seems to have worked for me but I'm sitting here thinking, surely, surely someone else has tried this before - I can't be the only one to think of it....

Matt
 
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I should also say that the performance trade-off seems to be negligable since the IDE controller was always the bottleneck anyway, Xbench scores are within 1-2% of what they were with the original drives, and within 10% of what they would be with the same drive in my G4.
 

dtravis7


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Just a quick question, what drives were you using when you got data corruption? Brand and size.
 
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Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 40G
Seagate Barracuda 5400rpm 40G
Samsung Spinpoint 7200rpm 120G
Maxtor 7200rpm 80G
IBM/Hitachi Travelstar (laptop) 5400rpm 60G

all showed corruption and became unstable with Panther and Tiger within 5-30mins of boot with the exception of the IBM which managed about 12hours.

then retested with all drives and no corruption seen in over 12 hours so then left the 7200rpm Seagate in the webserver and its been running ever since with a few reboots to do patches, and left the IBM in the other one and its been on ever since with no issues.

Matt
 

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