Redundancy

[kevin_standlee]

I brought two spare Dell D600 laptops with me, even though I forgot to bring any of the three clones backup hard drives for my main personal computer, which is machine 7 of the series of laptops I've used over the years. One of the spares is the one that didn't have a hard drive in it that I bought cheaply on eBay. I confirmed that the drive from machine 7 wouldn't boot on that one. The other spare was machine 6, from which I upgraded to a faster processor and because it was being cranky. However, machine 6 will at least boot on its hard drive. I can retrieve such files on which I'm working right now and install Skype on it. (One reason for having two active machines is so that I can use Skype while working on Day Jobbe; the company nanny software won't allow Skype to run.) So all is not lost, although I'm running on spares.

Comments

[howeird]

Just a theory about the multiple boot/HDD failures you're reporting. The D600 was designed to power a 40Gb drive. If you are using anything larger than 60Gb in there, it is possible over the long term this is too much for the power supply, and ("as you know, Bob") power supplies working at the edge of capacity can cause a wide variety of dead system symptoms. Maybe an external hard drive with its own power source, and a small internal boot drive will help the systems last longer.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Hm, that's plausible. But I mostly use the thing on a docking station with an oversize power supply, so I thought that wouldn't be an issue.

[howeird]

The docking station won't take the strain off of the internal power supply. If anything it will add to it - laptops at their core are designed to run on batteries.

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I have a D610 (well, two or three of them and an M20 which is really a D610 with a different Graphics Card), and I've never had the problem you are describing (even running a 250GB disk). Have you considered upgrading to the D610? Or are you sure the BIOS on the D600 can handle that size disk? Is it possible that some disk I/O is going awry because of the size of the disk and trashing the boot info?

[nojay.livejournal.com]

The power supply to the drive isn't a problem; larger capacity drives use the same amount of power or even less than the smaller ones because they are usually more modern designs with more advanced electronics.

You still shouldn't be having so many problems with these laptops as you are having. There is a known manufacturing problem with performance laptops, ones that heat up a lot under heavy computational load to the point where ball-grid-array chips can partially desolder themselves from the motherboard -- the use of modern no-lead low-pollution solder makes this more of a problem. Some laptop repair specialists offer fixes for just this eventuality.

Do you really hammer these laptops with lots and lots of high-CPU and high-GPU time? Do they get noticeably hot in use when you're running big numerical models?

One solution would be to buy a decent desktop PC and park it at Fernley to use when you're there. You'd have a bigger screen (or two) to work on as well. Any large data sets you're working on could live on flash drives or portable hard drives if you don't trust your internet connection in Fernley to give you decent or consistent speeds to the company servers via VPN.