Two New SATA-II Drives Malfunctioning: PSU Problem?

[Dave Perry]

Hi guys, this is a follow-up to a thread from last night. It's also a cross-post so forgive me, but I'll explain below why I'm in a hurry.

I got the parts for my Athlon 64 PC two days ago and most everything went well until I installed the two WD Caviar SE SATA-II drives, using my 460 Watt Soly-Tech PSU's SATA power connectors. I already had Windows XP installed on a 30 gig UATA drive using molex power. Everything seemed to be running fine, including the 6800 GS PCI-E graphics card and 2 GB PC3200. The mobo is an Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra.

When I installed the drives, first off they were very noisy. What I first thought was a noisy fan turned out to be one of the drives. It made a constant whining sound that the other drive didn't make. The other thing they both did was make numerous, irregularly spaced clicking sounds as Windows started up.

Then I tried formatting them. The first one formatted up to 91% and the formatting stalled. I tried again and it did exactly the same thing. I did a quick format on it and it read "healthy" in the disk manager, and I was able to install and run an application on it, but it continued making these same clciking noises off and on (though not as frequently as during startup). I'm told this is mostly likely the drive head failing in its seek/read and being reset abruptly, but I don't know why they are doing this.

Formatting the second drive was worse. Windows would just instantly freeze and require a hard restart of the computer. This happened right after initating the format process. I think I tried four times with the same results. This was the drive that made the constant sound like a bad fan whine.

I ran a disk check utility on the quick formatted drive, and after about sector 170,000, it started reading continuous errors and failure to read sectors. This just continued for several minutes so I quit the utility.

I got some advice last night that strange behavior can happen because of motherboards failing to support SATA-II properly, but I jumpered the drives down to 150 mb/sec and it seemed to make no difference.

The motherboard has extensive "health" diagnostics that happen during POST, and none of them seem to be indicating a problem in the board, but I'm not sophisticated enough to really read them deeply.

My two questions are:

1) Could anything at all in the mobo be causing this kind of disasterous drive problem right away, where numerous sectors are bad and formatting is difficult or impossible? Beyond possible problems with SATA-II, since I disabled that.

2) Could a problem with the power supply cause issues this extreme and immediate with new drives? The rating seems high enough for the h/w I have, and the output voltages are all appropriate, assuming they are working correctly. The PSU is new retail.

Is there a software way to check voltages coming from the power supply, and/or power supply regularity, or do I need to do it physically with a meter? Would those be stated by the BIOS?

Incidentally this power supply has built in overvoltage/overcurrent protection, if that means anything.

I'm in a bit of a hurry because I've been given a return authorization, but I'd hate to return these and get two new ones and just have this happen again.

Thanks very much in advance for your help.

Dave

 

[leegroves86]

Is there a software way to check voltages coming from the power supply, and/or power supply regularity, or do I need to do it physically with a meter? Would those be stated by the BIOS?

--- There are tons of software programs taht report voltages, unfortunately, they are all crap. None of them can be trusted. I have seen some that reported such voltages that my system would not evev be running and yet it does.

Its late and i'm tired, sry i can't help ya. BUMP BUMP BUMP

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Dave Perry
I already had Windows XP installed on a 30 gig UATA drive using molex power. Everything seemed to be running fine, including the 6800 GS PCI-E graphics card and 2 GB PC3200. The mobo is an Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra.

Molex power pretty much equals SATA power, as there are simple plug adapters for that. (There are SATA plugs with additional wires, but AFAIK, those aren't typically used.)

So, if you've tried just one new SATA II drive, and esp. if you've tried it via a SATA power adapter, then it seems very unlikely to be a power supply issue.

 

[Dave Perry]

Actually it was two drives, both identical WD Caviar SE's, and they were both on dedicated SATA outputs, no adaptors. But those drives do have molex inputs so I guess they must be the same. Any idea why they went with the blade form contact for the SATA? I actually find those kind of hard to get in. Is it because they can use smaller wire strands?

My one concern was that the voltage or somehow the output strength of just the SATA outputs on the PSU was off in some serious way, which was causing the SATA drives to go haywire but not causing problems anywhere else, but that seems unlikely if molex is the same voltage, etc., since my UATA drive is doing fine.

 

[hardcandy2]

From looking around the Web, some people have reported stability problems until they updated the bios, one example " Physical installation went smooth, and the round IDE cables make routing inside the case an easy job. There are onboard headers for USB, Firewire, and front audio jacks, if you have those features on your case. Installed Windows XP with no trouble and PC booted up on first try. Everything seemed to be going well, but I did have some stability issues for the first few hours; frequent lockups requiring a reboot. Can't be sure it was the motherboard but after installing the latest BIOS using the online web update utility, stability issues were gone.

Overall, a great purchase and would definitely recommend this board for a cheap, but powerful socket 939 solution." Posted on June 8, 2005. But would that cause the HD issue? And would your MB not have the newest Bios?