Linux Box Killing Drives?
 

I've got a $199 Walmart box that I installed Debian on. This machine seems to have a habit of eventually munching filesystems. They become non-readable and fsck throws out thousands of errors. This has happened to three or four drives so far over a couple years. Normally drives are very reliable so this seems very strange. I tried installing a drive controller card, thinking something was flaky with the controller on the motherboard but that didn't help.

Has anyone every heard of such a thing? Perhaps it's heat build up? Something else?

I'm repartitioning one of those drives on another machine and creating a filesystem to see if it gets better or still has problems. I don't feel like spending lots of $$$ on this as I just use it to server a few things but if I need to replace it with another cheap box I will do so. I can also replace the main board - it's only a 1.1 ghz chip anyway.

Thanks,

Eric

I would be more inclined to look at the power supply. In my limited experience, cheap power supplies can cause failed drives and/or mainboards. I had an old cheap box that had 3 failed drives in the first year and a half. Once I put a nicer Antec supply in, I never had another failed drive (5 years before I gave it away).

Interesting thought, but I've had two power supplies pop already and have had to replace them. I'm plugging the drives in some old Dell boxes I've got laying around and will be interested in seeing what happens.