Most bullet-proof drive solution?

[Crumb]

Using a PSU that gives a lot of power at exactly +5v is a good idea too. Use a multimeter to check it out.

[Heiroglyph]

This is sort of a cross post, but I wanted to update both threads for someone with the same problem in the future.  This was kicking my butt.

I finally got what seems to be a stable system.  I'm pretty sure it was a mixture of bad hardware.  At least motherboard, possibly CPU card and RAM in various combinations.

I swapped parts until I felt that I had a stable A3640 and A4000D, then installed OS3.1.

I ran this and replaced parts until it seemed rock solid. (took three motherboards...)

Then I installed the Warp Engine 3040 in that system.  This still seemed good even with 64MB RAM on board.

At that point, I felt cocky, so I put all the Mediator parts in and although they weren't used, it didn't make it unstable.

Then I replaced the 1.2GB IDE drive with the original 2GB SCSI the system came with and that also seems good.

So far I've copied 2GB of data (roughly the whole drive) back and forth between SCSI and IDE drives with no apparent data loss or lockups!

Woo Hoo!

I've got a good base now, so I should be able to tell when any given part is bad.  Next up, the 060 card!  I hope it is good!

I plan to use better SFS and CF drives instead of FFS and ancient IDE/SCSI once the hardware seems 100%.

[Dandy]

For desktop (mostly development, so lots of writes) use on either a 4000D or 4000T, what is the most reliable, but still fast drive configuration to use?

Well, in my towered A4000D with CyberstormPPC I used the UW-SCSI from the beginning to avoid unnecessary CPU load for disk operations.
Initially I just had a 4.3 gB UW-SCSI drive, but in the mean time I added a 160 gB IDE drive via Acard bridge ( http://www.vesalia.de/e_acard.htm?slc=us ).
As file system serves PFS3.
Very reliable - I had no failures during the last 10 years, and also the speed is quite good for this old system...

Preferably one that avoids as many drive size issues as possible, with any known connection type, I'll buy whatever I need to.

As I said above - my 160 gB drive works like a charm with PFS3 and OS 3.9/WarpOS.
Now I'm planning to add an external USB drive with one tB capacity and am confident it will also work flawlessly...

OS3.1 with what patches? 3.5? 3.9?
IDE, SCSI, USB, other?

OS 3.9/WarpOS 16.1 (also experimental OS 4.0 classic setup)
SCSI

Built-in controller?  Add on controller?

The UW-SCSI host adapter (controller) is onboard the CyberstormPPC board.

CF vs. thumb drive vs traditional spinning platters?
Can you constantly write to CF without wearing out the drive?
Do I need to use only tiny 2-4GB drives?

I have no experience in using those as hard drive replacement...

What filesystem?

PFS3

Partition sizes?

I have some 50 gB partitions, but larger ones should also be possible.

I just want to stop worrying about errors, data loss and lockups, it's killing the fun of using the system.

Thanks!

Well, my config worked fine without any errors, data loss or lockups for more than 10 years...