Hard drive turns off while computer is in operation

soybeast

Senior member
Apr 26, 2006
255
0
76
Hi, I'm kinda new to these forums (although I check the deals section often). Hopefully ya'll treat me nice :)

Anyways, here's my problem:

Recently, while my computer is in use (by me), I've heard one of my 3 physical drives power down then power back up for no apparent reason (this has happened at least twice AFAIK). I know it's this specific action because it's the same noise as when I turn off my computer and when I turn it on. I have SMART running and it reports 2 of the drives operating as normal (it doesn't see the third one for some reason, but I can read/write to it fine).

I'm wondering if it's a possible power issue, related or unrelated to my power supply or other causes. Is it possible that it's also related to the fact that over the past 6 months, due to my apartment's shoddy breakers overloading from too much power and no one coming to fix this issue, at least 10 times the power has gone off while my computer was on.

Has anybody ever encountered this issue? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

soy
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
9,558
0
76
The drive may be failing. You can try testing out whether the power connectors might be an issue by swapping them between drives. If possible, also disconnect one of the other drives for a while and see if the one drive continues powering down.

You may also wish to run the manufacturer's diagnostic utilities on the drive. Western Digital is Data LifeGuard Tools, Hitachi/IBM is Drive Fitness Test, Maxtor is PowerMax, I forget what Seagate's is called, SeaTools I think.

Flaky power can cause lots of odd problems eventually. Getting a cheap UPS (not so cheap that it's shoddy) is highly recommended for all computers.
 

MustISO

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,927
12
81
I had this happen a long time ago on an older system. Turned out the drive controller on the motherboard was going bad. I switched to a PCI IDE card and everything worked fine. May not be the same issue as you have, just wanted to share.
 

soybeast

Senior member
Apr 26, 2006
255
0
76
Ah, sorry for the late reply. I've been busy moving and haven't had time to test some things out.

Thanks for the advice guys, I'll keep ya'll posted if any of you are interested......

- soy