High 12V rail causing HD failure?

[AB]

I have an A1 400W power supply running my machine and I am noticing an extremely high 12V rail (13 V) and a 5V rail of (4.77-4.89). My 20 gig Maxtor just died 2 days ago and I thought it was just because of its age (~2 years). But then I realized that the power supply could be the problem. The HD made a clicking noise and now it is seen as a "Maxtor ORION" drive by the bios, and WIN2K doesn't even detect it. Can someone tell me if the high 12V rail could be the cause of my HD malfunction? I actually got a replacement from Maxtor today and put that in for about 1 hour and that same clicking noise. I cannot access this new drive either. So either Maxtor is shipping crappy drives, or some other reason. Please shed some light on this if you can. I have given a list of my peripherals.

Voltage Rails:
+3.3 V ------ 3.46 V
+5.0 V ------ 4.77-4.89 V
+12 V ------- 12.99 - 13.1 V (ouch)

Toshiba DVD
Plextor 8X CDRW
Seagate 80Gig Barracuda
Zip Drive
Floppy Drive
Ge-Force 3
Sound Blaster Live
Linksys Network Card
Epox 8K7A+
Athlon 1.4 OC'd to 1.56
512 DDR 2100 Crucial Ram
Delta Fan on Sk6 heatsink
4 case fans (Sunon)

 

[bozo1]

It should be within 5% and it is not, assuming whatever you are using to read the voltages is accurate. Don't know if that is the cause of your woes, however.

 

[AB]

I am using both MotherBoard Monitor in Win2K and also the bios, to monitor the rails.

 

[cirrus1]

If you have a voltmeter or a multimeter, try to measure the 12 V rail with that. From my experience, onboard voltage sensors can be far off at times.

 

[Woody419]

Hard drives die, generally no brand is better or worse than another. Using a computer without a backup system in place is living on the razor edge between happiness and disaster. The longer a hard drive lasts only means the more data you will loose when it fails.

Maxtors have a three year warrantee and will send out a replacement in less than a week. Why so fast? Because they have to do this all the time, probably hundreds of hard drives a day, every day. They know what you just found out, hard drives die.

If the 12 volt voltage was bad then it would also take out your cd-rom, cd-rw, zip, and floppy too.

 

[dkozloski]

+or- %10 is the industry standard for power supply voltages. Even then it is not that important unless it is spiking up and down rapidly. 12 volts can go to 13.2V before it is a problem.