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Fan Controller and Fan causes floppy drive failure
My thesis, which will sound nutty, is the following: The use of my Vantec
Fan Controller to turn down the speed of my two intake 80mm case fans causes my floppy drive to fail. I will defend this below but now for the setup, pathology, and history. Setup: I recently installed a Vantec Silver Nexus NXP-205 Rheobus (with 4 fan controllers) in my Kingwin K11 case. This case comes with 4 80mm fans two of which are intake fans that sit at the bottom front of the machine. Not much above these fans is the 3.5 inch drive external bays. The bottom bay contains my Vantec fan controller and the one immediately above that has my floppy drive. These two intake fans, that are close to the floppy drive, are attached to the first two of the 4 fan speed controllers. The other two controllers are attached to the other two distant case fans but apparently have no effect adverse on my floppy drive (regardless of how I set their speed controllers). History/pathology: The two intake fans are the loudest. I experimented with turning their speed down by setting their fan controllers to the lowest setting and noticing that the system temperature was not adversely effected (even though it was clear from the noise attenuation that the fans turned much much slower). I don't use my floppy drive much but eventually, over a few weeks, when I did I noticed it behaved erratically. I did not think for a moment that these two things were related. Specifically, some boot floppies (3 different ones) wouldn't boot almost all of the time. I thought the floppies were bad but they booted in other machines. I decided to quickly bypass this problem by making a boot CD from the floppy, one that same computer because it had the burner, using Nero CD burner, but when I tried that it couldn't read the files from the floppy or of that floppy's copy. I tried this multiple times. To me, from my experience, this indicated that the floppy drive was probably bad (versus the motherboard or the cable). However, when I swapped the floppy with that from another computer the supposedly bad floppy drive worked great. So, I figured it must be the floppy cable but when I tried the original floppy cable with the original floppy drive on the second computer it still worked great! Maybe a bad MB, hard to believe, so now I was confused so I reattached that cable and floppy to my original machine but I decided, really out of laziness, to leave the floppy drive outside the case on a mat. This time everything worked. I booted it to the floppy no less than 10 times with no problem (taking this floppy out and putting it back in - rebooting by power off, reset and CTRL-ALT-DEL). I booted up into Win2k and using Nero I was now able to make my boot CD from this floppy. I did this multiple times. I then repeated this whole process a few times removing the floppy from the drive bay (but still having it attached) and then putting it back in. I even removed it from the case out the front still leaving the cables attached so I wouldn't have to remove and reattach the floppy cables as that could theoretically be another source of error. Every time when the floppy drive was in the case it wouldn't work but when it was outside the case it would. Couldn't believe it! Finally, with the floppy drive installed in the drive bay, I turned up the fan controllers of the two intake fans all the way and NOW I was able to use Nero to successfully create the boot CD from the boot floppy. I did this test multiple times. When I turned the two (front) fan controllers all the way up the floppy always worked but when I turned it all the way down it always failed. It seems to fail even if the fan controllers half way but does work if its about 2/3 way. Then I tried turning the other two fan controllers all the way down with the intake fan controllers all the way up. This worked fine. But when I turned one of the intake fan controllers all the way down the floppy failed. Here's a table: The first four columns are the settings of fan controller 1 through 4 respectively (values: B - bottom power, T - Top Power, H - Half Power, 2 - 2/3 Power). The fifth column is whether the floppy drive failed (values: F - failed, W - worked) B B T T F T T B B W B B H H F 2 2 H H W B T H H W T B H H W T B B B F Conclusion: So clearly, there is a problem related to the Vantec Fan controller controlling these fans but after that I don't know what to say. The tests "B B T T F" and "T T B B W" indicate that the problem is context dependant on which fans are being controlled. Specifically, turning the first two fans, the ones close to the floppy drive, down will create a floppy failed while turning down the other two fans may not. However "T B H H W" and "T B B B F" indicate that the problem is NOT related to those two close intake fans because they were set the same in both tests but setting the far two fans low caused a failure. Ummm. |
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