What the hell is going on? Are my hard drives slowly dying one by one?

[lektrix]

These drives have been working flawlessly the last 3-5 years. No problems, no hitches. Now I am getting tons of problems because I decided to do a hot swap for my friend (link above) last week? This happened last week - http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2047360.

Now I've encountered a few more situations where my HDDs are disappearing in MY COMPUTER, not showing up in Disk Manager/Device Manager, and right now one is being recognized as "Bzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbz" in BIOS.

My other DATA drive disappeared once mysteriously the other day, it's fine now I think. But the same thing happened to my GAMES drive, a Raptor drive, and it's showing as as "Bzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbz" in BIOS. Windows does a CHKDSK and fails (unspecified error) every time. It's just a drive for GAMES and I did install a test copy of WINDOWS 7 x64 for fun but I haven't used it in months...

Something is not right. I did make one physical change last night (everything was working fine). I moved 2 of my drives to the upper cage and left 2 at the bottom for better airflow and improved case management. Because of this I had to switch around the SATA ports/cables so for i.e. DATA which was on Channel 3 could now be on Channel 2 but that shouldn't matter right?

Sigh....

 

[lektrix]

bump

 

[RebateMonger]

Hard drive temperatures and power supply voltages within normal limits?

 

[Raduque]

Failing power supply maybe? I've done hot-swaps with SATA drives before with no issues (added a 250gb and 500gb, pulled a 120gb) on my main rig.

Running a 965 chipset mainboard with Vista Ultimate, but I've hot swapped in both Vista and 7.

Edit: I always connect the SATA cable first, then the power, then I refresh device manager. You also have to have your SATA controller in AHCI (ACHI?) mode, not "IDE" or "RAID".

 

[Emulex]

fail power supply
or pwned

 

[wwswimming]

sounds like a case of Hard Disk Necrosis. the CDC issued a bulletin about this a few months ago.

 

[lektrix]

Failed Corsair HX620??? Unthinkable

 

[semo]

what drives are we talking and have you tried their respective manufacturer's scan tools?

have you also tried using different power connectors?

 

[Russwinters]

I am not sure what you expect from a HDD, but 3-5 years is about the right time for them to die. Sometimes you will get lucky and they will last over 5 years, but for the most part drives will head down hill after 3 Years.

Drives are mechanical devices that begin to degrade and wear down from the moment they are powered on. There is nothing you can do to stop this.


Run a scan on the drives, check the SMART. Use HDDscan or MHDD to check the delays on the sectors.



Regards,

 

[Brian Stirling]

As has been alluded to before heat and power supplies are the two most likely causes of multiple HD failures in a short period. It would be nice to look at the PS output with an O'scope but other than that check to make sure your fans are working and the filters are clean. Also check that there isn't furballs (no filters) laying around the inside of your box.

Of course it is possible for multiple HD's to fail but not usually this close together without something like heat or bad PS's causing it.


Brian

 

[Martimus]

This happens to me when my Powersupply is going. Replacing the PSU seems to fix the issue.

 

[Blain]

Are you using any power conditioning or backup?

 

[Emulex]

i've had power supplies and cables go bad (cables in usb sense) - i think the cables had over 400 inserts so that wasn't suprising. but yeah bad power will kill your drive - bad being low/high/unstable/noisy whatever.