Western Digital WD800JB HDD problem

[BBond]

I have four WD800JB drives in two RAID0 arrays. My board is an Abit IC7-G. One array on ICH5R which has my OS partition on it, the other on the Sil Image controller. I'm using two Abit Serillel 2 converters for the ICH5R drives and 2 Highpoint Rocket Head 100 converters on the Sil Image drives. My case is a Lian Li PC60 USB. This setup makes for a lot of wires which I've routed behind my mobo tray.

Infrequently I'll hear one of the drives spin down. The drive drops out. I take the side panel off my case and simply touch the Molex wires and the drive will spin up and work fine again. I've RMAed two drives back to WD already. One from the OS array and the other from the Sil Image.

After re-installing the OS on the ICH5R array everything worked fine for months. Then a Sil Image array drive started with the same problem. I replaced the Sil Image drive, everything was fine for months, and now one of the OS array drives is at it again. Today, after air dusting the inside of my case, an OS array drive dropped out again. I touched the wires and it's working fine again.

What could be causing different drives on both controllers to spin down and drop out?

I've tried different wires, changing converters, different Molex connectors on my Enermax 431W PSU and still the same problem happens.

I'm about ready to throw in the towel and buy regular SATA drives since the prices have come down, pick up four external drive enclosures and use the WD800JB's as external storage. I'm tired of replacing drives.

Other than a HDD dropping out occassionally everything else is working fine.
Any help or thoughts on what can be causing these problems will be greatly appreciated.

TIA

 

[RadiclDreamer]

I've been having problems with the 800jb drives as of late, I get about 25 a month and am having an unusually high failure rate, more than 10%

Maybe this means its not just you

 

[BBond]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
I've been having problems with the 800jb drives as of late, I get about 25 a month and am having an unusually high failure rate, more than 10%

Maybe this means its not just you

The thought occured to me that it could be an inherent problem with this drive.

What drives do you get the best reliability from? I installed two Maxtor 60GB drives in the wife's computer almost three years ago and *crosses fingers* never have had a single problem with either.

It might be time to switch.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Well, it used to be WD, but now I've been with maxtor with very few issues

 

[Elcs]

Like every manufacturer, theres always going to be bad times and good times for production runs.

Ive never had any HDD die on me. Used Maxtor, Seagate, IBM, Hitachi, Fujitsu (i think), Samsung... and Im currently using 2 WD's. My dad has had only 1 drive die on him and that was an IBM.

 

[BBond]

I've had an IBM Deskstar die and so far these two WD's. I'm wondering if WD drives have an electrical problem. Both the WD drives have died from what appears to be a problem maintaining power to the drives.