What keeps killing my hard drives?

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fletch

2[H]4U
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Feb 17, 2002
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I'm running a 2200+, dvd burner, cd burner, live drive, gf4 ti4800, and 3 hard drives (2 wd and 1 maxtor) on an antec truepower 350W. My 80GB maxtor died after a few weeks of the click of death, but luckily i was able to back everything up. A few days after that, I got a 120GB WD hard drive. My computer has been running fine since then, up until tonight. I came home from my gf's house to find my monitor acting like it was trying to push too high of a refresh rate. I rebooted, and I heard the dreaded click click noise. I thought it might be possible that my power supply was really stressed, so I unplugged both my cdroms. Still got the click click, so I started unplugging my hard drives one by one, until I narrowed the problem down to my WD 80GB system drive. I managed to get it to boot into safe mode after many tries with a 120GB wd plugged in, and now i'm trying to back up as much as i can from it, which is taking forever since every few seconds it clicks, spins down, spins up, repeats.

I guess the plan now is to use another 120GB that I just got as my new system drive after i'm done backing stuff up, i'm going to try to run the wd diagnostics and stuff on all my drives though once i find a floppy drive to hook up.

What keeps killing my hard drives? They never get very hot...could it be a stressed power supply over a period of time? Maybe running bittorrent 24/7 and constantly reading and writing to them causes excessive wear? I can't figure it out, and i'm going to go insane if another hard drive dies.

Any input is GREATLY appreciated. Thanks!
 
Originally posted by TheMostWantedPolishTwin
what are your voltage readings for 12V rail? overvolting might be killer for HD...
Click to expand...

does it matter if the reading is taken in the bios or in windows?
 
Originally posted by fletch
does it matter if the reading is taken in the bios or in windows?
Click to expand...

bios is the most trustworthy for the build in reader, although I would toss a multimeter on it.


Could be a surge of power coming from the psu, i've had one bad psu fry 2 mobo's and 1 hd before i noticed it was a power issue....
 
alright, idling in the bios the readings are:

bios: 12.03V
multimeter: 11.88V

in windows:

multimeter: 11.89V

when booting up it clicks for the first time when loading Mup.sys every time so far...then keeps clicking after that...i wonder if that has to do with it
 
Originally posted by fletch
alright, idling in the bios the readings are:

bios: 12.03V
multimeter: 11.88V

in windows:

multimeter: 11.89V

when booting up it clicks for the first time when loading Mup.sys every time so far...then keeps clicking after that...i wonder if that has to do with it
Click to expand...

toss a different psu in there, just to be safe
 
alright i'm running on some god awful unknown wattage generic psu (all i could fine) and it booted up fine, no clicks. xp is running chkdsk, got some unreadable errors on the drive....they went by too fast to see and now it just rebooted...no clicks...and it's in windows now.

wtf! james i think you hit it right on the nose, it must be that god damn antec psu. i guess my old maxtor 80gb isn't dead after all.

this power supply is reading a steady 12.72V on the multimeter

edit: thank you james! im gonna get some sleep and get a new power supply in the morning.
 
jsut and FYI, i have moded the rails on my antec 550w and my 12v line reads (multimeter) a 12.1 under load, and 12.9 idel, andi have no problems.

My HDDs are 4 maxtor 80gig 8mb cash (cant remember how to spell it)
 
you've already hit the nail on the head, it sounded like a power supply issue to me. Antec is usually really good for longevity.

however, since you have had the clicks, I would suggest wiping the drive as soon as possible using a utility called WIPE
http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/wipe.exe
WIPE is an older utility designed by IBM. You have to put it on a win98 bootable floppy or something for it to work. the command is "wipe X" where X is the drive position. 0 is primary master, 1 is primary slave, 2 is secondary master, 3 is secondary slave...does not work on secondary controllers or RAID controllers.

wipe it twice for good measure, if there are no error messages, format, and go ahead and start using it again.

if it is merely coincidental that the HD and PSU are related at this point, you'll be very pissed off if the HD one day flips the middle finger at you
 
Are the hard drives getting proper cooling? heat can kill them pretty quick.
 
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