Hard Drive Corruption

[Penth]

I have a home server with 4 Maxtor 160GB drives for storage. I've been backing up my DVDs to the server. I had one of the drives filled and had a file corruption error and lost the 15 or so DVDs I had backed up. Now it just happened again to two more and I lost like 30 images. I can back them up again, but what could possibly be causing this.

The Server is an Asus A7V-E with an Athlon 1100 running at 990Mhz. Nothing is running on this computer but windows and file sharing. It's got 768mb ram and a gigabit NIC, but I don't think any of that is causing this. Any ideas?

Edit: Also, are there any advanced tools I can use to pull data off of these drives even though the file table is gone and windows says the drives aren't formatted?

 

[CrispyFried]

Memory errors from too tight timings, overclocking, bad or loose cables are good ways for file corruption to happen.

 

[xsilver]

overclocking (out of spec pci bus)
improper shutdowns of Hdd (spinning heads suddenly stopped)

 

[allanon1965]

well i have been having many problems with maxtor hard drives latley, it seems when they started offering only a year warranty, i started having them drop like flies....4 of them in less than 6 months, all on different rigs....different sizes, 30, 40, 60 and now an 80.....i just bought a new seagate with a five year warranty and hope it will be better, i used to use seagates exclusivley because i had great luck with them, then a local pc shop buddy talked me into going maxtor and i have regretted it ever since.....for awhile they were fine, but then they started dropping.....they were cheaper than seagates, now i know why.....i am not flaming maxtor, just relating my own experience......good luck....

 

[Penth]

an athlon 1100 running at 990 is underclocked. Woudl that cause problems? I don't even know where to start in figuring this out. I've never seen it before.

 

[Raduque]

I learned the hard way an UNDERclocked PCI bus can adversly affect HDs. If your mobo doesn't have a PCI lock (where you can adjust the PCI speed seperate from the FSB), you might be running the PCI bus at a speed the HDs don't like. In my experience, Maxtors are less tolerant of out-of-spec PCI bus speeds. Try running the CPU and FSB @ spec, and see if the HDs stop dropping data.