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What could kill/damage a hard drive?

M

MrGrim

Golden Member
I'm getting very supsicious about my setup, it seems to hates HDs. My last 5 IBM HDs have died and my WD 1200JB started to get bad sectors and is now failing to load Win2k. This Octomber I'm starting my final year at uni and I can't afford another HD dieing on me, I want to get this sorted once and for all.

So, what could possibly be causing this? Could it be the motherboard? Perhaps the power supply? It could of coure be a crazy coinsidence but I'd like to take some steps against this happening again anyway.

Thank you in advance
 
Three letters for you.

IBM


Buy a maxtor or Western Digital.

edit:read you have a WD,Vibrations or exessive shock will cause premature HD faillure,do you move around your box often?
 
Well that's what I thought as well, that IBM just sux hard, but my WD dieing (withing 3 months of purchace that is) got my thinking that IBM may not be the one to blame here.

I don't care if something is not likely to damage a HD, I need to know all the things that are capable of damaging a HD.
 
Surge Protector is an extrememly good canidate. I had a friend who bought a brand new Dell, one week later the hard drive and memory were toast. The cause was power surges. The brand new APC surge protector that Dell was forcing down everyone's throat that week, simply didn't work from the beginning. Other times your surge protector goes bad and the same thing can happen. Especially if you live in a college dorm where the wiring sucks to begin with (ahhh, the good ole days of college).

However, since you've had so many die in similar fashion, power supply would also be a good canidate. The biggest problem you're going to have since this is a degenerative condition, is that coming up with the correct diagnosis make take a little while, and you mentioned that you can't afford to lose data. You should DEFINITELY use something like Drive Image to back up your entire disk once a week (and make sure you back it up to a separate drive). Since this machine's power supply and/or surge protector may be causing the problems, it would be even better to back it up to a different machine as well.

Just some suggestions off the top of my head.
 
Cool, so the PSU/"power problems in general" could be a problem. That's fair enough, I'll get my self a surge protector and a new PSU. What about the motherboard, is it possible to cause damage to a HD? How about faulty IDE cables?

Thank you for the replies
 
I had an Abit motherboard with a bad IDE controller on it a little while back. Started spewing (virtual) crap all over the drive. Started as bad sectors, then read/write failures, then finally one day it just couldnt see the HD anymore.

What I'm trying to say is, unfortunately, it could be the IDE controller. An even more remote possibility is the IDE cable itself. Good luck!
 
What could kill/damage a hard drive?
Click to expand...

Driving over it with a semi-truck.
Dropping it out of an airplane.
Taking it with you into the bathtub.
Throwing it into a volcano.
Using it as a pillow during a MRI scan.

Those might do it. But power is a good place to start looking too.
 
Originally posted by: motoamd
Does o/c stress it?
Click to expand...

I've suspected that it does, but I've never seen anything definitive. For a while one of my Athlon systems was going through HD's about every 4 months. I scaled back the O/C and it seemed to help, but the drive still died eventually. I suspect it was really the VIA controller since it caused other IDE problems. I noticed that MrGrim isn't using a VIA chipset.
 
Originally posted by: kgraeme
What could kill/damage a hard drive?
Click to expand...

Driving over it with a semi-truck.
Dropping it out of an airplane.
Taking it with you into the bathtub.
Throwing it into a volcano.
Using it as a pillow during a MRI scan.

Those might do it. But power is a good place to start looking too.
Click to expand...


lol, u funny mofo fo sho 😀
 
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