Multiple WD Hard drive failures

[agent8six]

I have been through approximately 5 or 6 Western Digital hard drives in the past couple of years. They have all been covered under warranty so it has only cost me the price of shipping, but I am getting sick of the hassle. Is this common or is something wrong with my system. I have replaced everything at one time or another including the mobo, vid card, and power supply. I have a 550 watt ps and 4 hard drives in 2 mirror arrays. The rest of my specs are an Athlon 2500+, DFI LanParty2 mobo, 512MB of Crucial memory, a Geforce 4 video card. I can handle replacing the drives, I just wish there was an explanation for why they keep failing me. Maybe I just have bad luck. Please let me know if you have any ideas. Thanks

 

[MichaelD]

I'll bet you're still using the same IDE cable, right?

I'll let that one sink in a minute.


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I'll bet you're digging for a new cable right about now.

Being that you've changed everything BUT the cable....it points at the cable.

 

[agent8six]

Actually, the last time a drive failed I tried changing the cable and it still showed that it was bad when running the WD diagnostics, so I don't think it's the cable.

 

[MichaelD]

Hmm, OK, I gave it a shot.

Don't know what's up with WD IDE drives. They seem to be hit or miss.

I bought two 120GB 8mb cache drives about two years ago. They are God's Gift to the Geek. Fast and dependable. No probs.

I bought the same drive for my ex-GFs comp in mid April. The drive failed 3 weeks later. *shrug* No idea at all.

 

[Budman]

How's your case ventilation?

Do you have fans blowing air onto them?

I love Antec cases for this,most of them have built in HD coolers.

Most of the time when a HD fails it's because of heat.

 

[mitchafi]

In my antec 1080AWG I have an antec 80mm fan directly in front of my HD's. How do I tell if it is sucking or blowing, and either way, it should help right? Since its either blowing outside cold air in or sucking out hot air.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

what model WDs,theres a few duds out there that they keep sending back out

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: mitchafi
In my antec 1080AWG I have an antec 80mm fan directly in front of my HD's. How do I tell if it is sucking or blowing, and either way, it should help right? Since its either blowing outside cold air in or sucking out hot air.

It should be blowing cold air onto them from the outside.


Outside > front of case > fan > HD > inside case > exaust fan > outside .

 

[0roo0roo]

excessive heat doesn't make for long drive life. i like cases with front intakes that blow over hd's. keeps em below 30c

 

[Bovinicus]

I had a problem with HDD corruption on my system when I used 2-5-2 memory timings. When I changed to 2-6-2 (I forget what the parameter stands for), then they went away.

 

[grepcomputers]

I just had two WD Caviar's die on me about a week apart. I have pretty good case ventialtion too, and I switched out (and around) the IDE cables. What it seems to have been was that my 40lb subwoofer was too close to the computer (apparently 4 feet away is too close).

I moved the sub (out of the room for now) and not only did it allow the drives to function long enough for me to back up all the data I needed, one of them stopped giving me an error in the WD DataLifeGuard tools (I still don't trust it though).

cheers...

 

[agent8six]

Is that possible that a speaker can affect a hd from 4 feet away? I never thought of that, but my sub is also about 4 feet away. Well, I guess it's time to rearrange the old office. Thanks for the input, I hope this fixes it.

 

[0roo0roo]

oh, don't jolt the hd while its on. no, subwoofer magnet couldn't do jacksquat from 4feet away. it would have to be 1mm away from the platter.

 

[jameso321]

I just lost 2 160 Gig WD drives.

There is cooling in front of the drivers with 2 x 80mm fans.

I would still say its a very hot situation though as I have 5 drives.

I still dont think they should die on me though.



They are both in warranty and are both being replaced. I think im going to mount them in the 5.25" bays with the Zalman Heatpipe coolers - its worth a shot I guess.


Jameso321

 

[T9D]

Could be virus's too. If you are transferring old data onto the new drive you could be transferring virus's too.

I did some work at my moms business. 3 hardrives died with in the same day. I couldn't do anything with them, not even a lowlevel format. Totally toasted. We found out later the the original computer had over 70 virus's on them! A few of those made it onto the new computers and toasted the drives for good.

(this was after a fresh OS install on the new drives)