External Hard Drive causing instability?

U

undercoverDrunk

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 20, 2004
Messages
158
I have a WD world book 500G. I normally do not have it connected to my main computer but recently I am doing some backing up. For some reason my normally stable OC with minor voltage tweaks has been going to crashtastic land. I dialed everything down, played with a 1:1 divider, pulled memory from 4up to 2up, retested memory until I discovered said hard drive was the issue.I became suspicios when the bios wouldn't post past the memory check phase when the hard drive was connected. When disconnected everything is memtest and orthos stable.

Has anyone else ran into this? Is this a bad usb part, bad hard drive, or something else?

Just curious as I punch this external in the face for wasting 3 hours of my life.
 
The power draw from an external 3.5" HDD can be pretty significant. I could imagine it destabilizing an OCed system.
 
Yeah, I've got a 320gig WD MyBook that I use for backing up my system, and I ran into the same thing, except a little different. I plugged mine into the power strip that my computer and everything else is on, and when I did so, I noticed that I would lose internet and my router would begin to act weird. I also think something else on my computer began to act sketchy as well, but I don't remember as it was a few months ago. But yeah, once I plugged it into a separate outlet, I had no problems. I thought it was pretty weird, but they must just draw a huge amount of power, which make other things that need that power become unstable of course.
 
All I can say is, a week later without the external I have not had any stability problems from boot or windows (other then the usual wtf). This is with playing TF2 and CC3. I guess I'm looking for a TB NAS soon.
 
I don't think a 3.5" external is drawing much, if any, power from your computer thru the USB port. Isn't it actually plugged into the wall (110v)?

Maybe a different 110v line or a decent UPS would solve your problem?
 
Yeah, I don't think it's the USB either. That's why mine was messing the router up. It was just sucking all the power from the power strip causing other things on it to become unstable.
 
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