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Hard Drive Failures (Help!)

G

Gondi

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 31, 2003
Messages
241
I've got 5 harddrives in my box. Recently I started hearing the "click of death".. Ran a few diagnostics.. chkdsk....started checking SMART.. nothing too strange and I wasn't getting errors. I'll admit that I was keeping the drives fairly full, generally around 10% of space free, with regular defragments.

Then I started getting hard freezes. Explorer would freeze. ActiveSMART would throw an error or two at me every 6 hours or so. More diagnostics.... Reformat of my primary drive. Still no closer to tracking down the problem.

I disconnected the drives and went one by one to see which one was giving me problems. WD and Maxtor diagnostics only tracked down one error which they "fixed". It seems to be the luck of the draw if I can get though a boot with one of the offending harddrives as a slave. Sometimes it freezes before windows loads, sometimes after, sometimes it's OK.

It doesn't seem to have any rhyme or reason... I'm using both the mobo IDE channels and a PCI ATA card. I'm starting to think that it may be powersupply related. I have a 430W Antec which ran all 5 drives fine for the past year.

Anyone have any ideas as far as diagnostics I could try to check the drives better, something to check the power supply, or any other thoughts?

TIA

Windows 2k
Epox 8rda /w 2100+
ATI 9500
80G maxtor
80G maxtor <----- ones acting up
180G WD <------ ones acting up
60G WD
80G WD
 
clicking is generally the HDD either reinitializing or recalibrating
its basically the arm snapping back and froth searching or startingup\landing

intermittent power or data signal might account for either
(especially since they are checking out with the diagnostics one at a time)

this sound familiar?

again from Dans Data
Even if no errors that actually get past the checking process, you still don't want a high error rate, because it slows down your drives. CRC only provides error detection, not error correction; to get the correct version of data, blocks with errors have to be sent again.

This means that long or just plain lousy cables may give you better drive performance if you lock the appropriate IDE channel to a slower transfer mode in your computer's BIOS setup. The theoretical available bandwidth is then lower, but if the error rate drops from "tons" to "not many" because you've now got the system running below the IDE cable's threshold of crumminess (a technical term), the net result can be better drive speed.

Bit rot
If you've got a major IDE data loss problem, things will be obviously broken. Drives won't be recognised consistently (or at all) on boot, every file operation of any significant size will cause errors, swap file activity will hang the computer.

That's not the kind of problem you're likely to have from a common-or-garden over-length cable, though. When bits only fall on the floor relatively occasionally, the drives will not obviously be the culprit. If the hardware error detection's catching almost all of the foul-ups, all you'll see is strangely slow drive performance. Since drive speed has little impact on most desktop computer tasks, you probably won't notice

The most heavily accessed part of your drive is very probably going to be the part that holds your Windows swap file. Since the swap file is literally part of your computer's random access memory as far as Windows is concerned, IDE data integrity problems can cause the same sorts of symptoms as faulty RAM.

Many of these symptoms don't look like drive errors at all. Swap file errors won't give you a disk error warning message; your computer will just jam its head enthusiastically up its cloaca and start chewing like mad. If you don't suspect the drive cable, you will then get to spend a significant fraction of your life cursing at the thing and swapping out perfectly OK components, to no avail.

A computer in this state can give the user the "anti-Midas touch" - everything you touch can turn to dung. Any write operation may, or may not, result in small but file-killing errors.

Oh, yes - what's the second-most-accessed single chunk of disk space on a Windows box? Probably the registry, baby. You don't want errors there, either.
Click to expand...

Id definately check the power connections, and cable connections
then swap PSUs and data cables (and simplify the config until its sorted out, if its running fine with a single drive...two...but not three

also see Corrupted Files!?
 
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