So, you remember all the hard drive problems of late? Well, this one takes the cake.
So, I put a 200 gig maxtor in and then released that it was one of the Raid drives. So, I drop the raid, find the bad drive and remove it. I do good until yesterday, when I turn on the PC my NEW drive is screaching. Return it to CompUSA who doesnt have any more in stock or any actual plan to reorder them. Fishy. I spend 10 more dollars for 40 less gig since the 160 wasn’t on sale like the 200 and bring it over. I take my old drive, the 30 gig one, and make it a master. I use that drive, the new 160 and one of my 160 SATA drives. Reload WinXP and a bunch of games. Then the 30 gig drive starts to fail again. So it was failing in the first place. Finally, reload WinXP again on the new 160 and keep the other 160 in there as well.
This is after I upgraded my bios and it wouldn’t work in enhanced mode for several hours until I reloaded it again.
SOOOO, I’ve reloaded Windows 4 times, Planetside as well. I downloaded WoW again once and have to do it again.
I have a few theories about this:
I have a 350W power supply and having as many HDD as I had on it made it go bonkers and damage a drive or two.
bad luck. the 30 gig was dying because it’s old and the RAID is a bad idea. The Maxtor drive I got first, I was told by the store, had been returned by several people (the make, not my specific one) and they had no plans of reordering it. This all seems fishy to me about the 200 gig drive, like maybe they were all bad or had a high fail rate.
I had hard problems. My 250GB Maxtor died on me, but I was able to RMA it and they sent me a new one. But to avoid problems, I’ve simplified my life.
I suspect that heat perhaps killed my first drive. I have a SFF that was packed to the gills, so I removed my secondary SATA drive to open up some room for air circulation and take out a component that was generating surpluss heat.
Suggest you strip down to 1 drive and see how it does for a while.
A friend at work had almost the exact same problem. Repeatedly. Eventually he gave up and bought a whole new machine. Then, and only then, did he run memtest86, and found out that he had flaky memory which was why his drives became hosed so quickly.
On the other hand, I think you are probably just unlucky.
Hard drive operating temperatures are MUCH MUCH LOWER than CPU operating temperatures. 55C max. Never let a hard drive get so hot that it is painful to the touch.
I did put in a couple of fans but it was too late. Now, the 200 gig one was crazy. It stayed cool to the touch and then that morning I turned the pc on and it was doing the scratching. I touched it and one of the chips on it almost burned my hand.
You can if you corrupt the windows drivers. Which is the only way I can see this happening.
You will get general hard-drive failures being reported if the sector tables become corrupted by bad writes as well. Although in this case the hard-drives are recoverable.
