My Hard drive Is ALWAYS having problems HELP!!!

[mjkim]

Hey guys... I currently have ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Mobo, with Antec True 430W Power supply. And my CPU is AMD 2500 Barton, and my video card is Radeon 9800 Pro.

See... Sofar, I've replaced every single one of these because whenever i setup my computer on a raid, they start clicking... And the clicking sound isn't like where it sounds like two metals are rubbing, but more like the harddive looses speed and it spins backup to the right speed...

In the beginning, I had two 36.6 WD Raptor SATA harddrives setup on the raid... They work fine sometimes... but sometimes it would start clicking randomly...

So I thought it was maybe the motherboard, and i replaced it... same problem... so, then i went to get rid of the SATA raid all together, and bought myself a Promise Fasttrack TX4000 raid controller... with that, I currently have 4 IDE WD 80GB harddrives setup on a raid. everything was working fine for like a week... but then back to the SAME problem!

I can't tell you the number of times that i've replaced my hard drives because of this clicking sound.... So i'm almost 99.9% sure its not the harddrives... And it can't be the mother board because i've had 3-4 different mother boards (kept sending them in for RMA) I'm pretty sure its not the raid controller because even with the new mother board, i'll have the same problem on my sata drives...

The only possible thing that i can think of, is that the power supply isn't strong enough.... But i would like to hear all possible opinions before i go ahead and buy myself a new power supply...

I'm really getting sick of all this raid problems.. and i would really love it if any of you guys can come up with a solution for me... Thanks guys~

 

[CraigRT]

Power problems also come to mind for me.

I'd consider swapping the PSU out and see how it goes then.

Next possible problem is heat.. are the drives cooled well? I've seen drives fail due to heat more than once.

 

[MarioBros]

It could, but most unlikley be the Click Of Death..
Maybe it's the mobo...

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: MarioBros
It could, but most unlikley be the Click Of Death..
Maybe it's the mobo...

you really should have read the whole thing

 

[mjkim]

Thanks guys for the posts sofar... As CraigRT said... I also think possibly its the PSU that's causing the problems... although... I would think that 430 is more than enough....

Ok... To be a bit more focused... the problems usually(from what i observed reciently) occur... 1. when window's is booting... 2. when i open microsoft outlook... 3. running world of warcraft

with windows and microsoft outlook, the clicking followed by spinning up to the speed sound comes and goes... but as for the game... it seems to constantly do it...

And when something like this happens... the whole computer freezes for a sec or two... since the harddrive is trying to get back to speed.. and until it does so, it can't read from it... and as far as the harddrive... i think its random... as in since i have 5 hard drives on raid... the one that goes into this "clicking" is random... any one of them is prone to do so... but from what i know at this point, only one does it at a time...

and i KNOW it really can't be the mobo... because i've replaced it sooo many times...

I hope what i've wrote here helps~ thanks guys~

 

[mjkim]

Hey guys... I would love it if you guys can give me some recomendations on a PSU... Thanks~

 

[ribbon13]

<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-103-4
8&depa=0">Sparkle FSP550-60PLG</a>

 

[stevty2889]

That PSU should be plenty enough for what you have, but I guess it can't hurt to try another one to rule it out.

 

[Gunnman]

I had the same board once and the same thing was happening. I had an irq sharing issue going on. Do you have an external USB drive connected or is your USB controller sharing on your HDD controllers irq ?

 

[mjkim]

It was when i was using the other marvell network adapter, but since then i switched over to nvidia network adapter which doesn't seem to conflict with any other. Yet i'm still having the same problem... how did u go about fixing it?

 

[dunkster]

Many have experienced problems with the basic Nvidia IDE/ATAPI driver. If it's installed, try rolling back to the standard Windows IDE/ATAPI driver.

Have you tested the individual drives for bad blocks? It only takes one bad block on one drive. Test each with the WD DLGDIAG utility.

Antec 430 PS's do fail. I lost one.

Hope this helps!