I can say for sure it was the block that caused the data errors
... the drive is actually working fine... it just had errors that had to be corrected. Once the block was removed I didn't hear the heads "realigning" themselves (read: "banging"
).
I suspect had my tolerences of the block mounting been better with just one or two thousandths clearance on the spindle motor it would not have occured.
I believe that the clamping force of that 1/2" copper block could EASILY warp the aluminum casing. I will be revisiting the whole setup anyway as I'm now ZeroFilling the drive to recover the low level format.
I will probably go with stacked drives and a cage made from copper with water passages on each side and a loop in the front to connect them. :shrug:
This will also save space in the case as I have a lot of tubing and a large reservior. Not to mention that I got an additional two drives to make the RAID 0 into a RAID 0 + 1.
