[PLUG] Tape Drives and Power Supplies ( was strange crashes ... )

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Rogan" == Rogan Creswick <creswick at gmail.com> writes:

Russell> I guess it could still be some fault on the SCSI card or the
Russell> cable, but I guess I am coming back to the power supply as
Russell> the currently most likely culprit.  I am still not clear how
Russell> the tape backup could be inducing a dodgy power supply to
Russell> shut off the computer, particularly when the failure occurs
Russell> well (like hours in some cases) into the backup, but then
Russell> again *nothing* about this is clear.

Rogan> Could the tapedrive be causing unusualy high disk activity?
Rogan> (reading from numerous disks, while writing logs to another, or
Rogan> something like that?).  Could it be causing optical drives to
Rogan> spin up also?  That might explain a higher-than-normal load,
Rogan> which would again lead to power issues.

Nope.  This is a bare box, with only one HD, a floppy and a SCSI card
in a PCI slot.  LAN, Audio and Video are all on the motherboard, but
of those only the LAN has anything connected.  Otherwise, only a
serial console and the SCSI cable to the external tape drive.

I tried to induce a load with heavy disk seeking and it didn't seem to
bother it in the least.  Also, I just removed two IDE drives and
replaced them with one IDE drive.  You'd think the electrical load
would have gone down from that.

The tape-related failures started immediately after the disk change.


-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com