Hard drive trouble

[nissanztt90]

Firstly, this involves 2 Seagate Barracudas 250gb 7200.10 16mb cache SATA hdds, in a stripped RAID array.

Installed them a week or so ago, everything was fine. Got a new powersupply this monday, installed that, and everything was fine, until today. I get home from work, the computer is still on, desktop is there, the clock is working and displaying the correct time, but the mouse is extremely slow to respond, like it takes a good 30 seconds to respond to mouse movement.

So, i reboot, and as its booting back up, the raid array reports the new 250x2 array as "unhealthy". I shut it off, open it up, and one of the power cables is hanging out of the drive a little bit. Push it back in, turn it on...array is healthy, both drives detected. When it goes to load windows, one, or possibly both of the drives starts clicking, alot. Mess around for awhile, still keeps doing it. Figure ill try a fresh format since there wasnt too much stuff on the drives yet.

Get through most of the Windos Vista install, it gets to expanding the files about 76%, and starts making the clicking sounds again. Figure one of the drives is probably shot. Neither drive will load Vista though. One gets to 17% and then everything just stops, and one the Windows Vista install wont even detect. BIOS detects both of them, however. Also, if i set them into a stripped array, the bios detects it, and Vista detects it, but the install is hung up just the same.

So i guess my question is, can the drive die and make loud clicking noises just from the power plug being half way out? The only other thing i can think of is heat. I have an Antec P182, with the 4 drives in the lower chamber, and removed the lower chamber tri-cool but forgot to put it back in, and it was pretty damn hot in my room today. I have two 36gb rapptors down there too, and so far as i can tell, they are fine.

So, if youve read this far, thanks...what are your thoughts?

 

[oplin]

I would say yes the drive could die from that, but probably not. I would see if you can RMA the drives. I would say if the power cord was louse and the one drive was off and the cable touched enough to make a connection that could kill the drive if it was loosing power and gaining power while the pc was on.

 

[BadBlock]

When you say clicking do you mean the hard drive was grinding away like it was doing lots of read/write operations, possibly trying to sync the array? Or was it clicking in some unusual sounding or repetitive pattern when there was little or no drive activity? If it was the latter then it's quite possible the electronics are fried.

The circuit boards on hard drives are very sensitive to electrical spikes and static. Sata connectors are supposed to be safer than the old molex connectors since they have long ground pins on both edges of the connector but I have seen a lot of very poorly made sata cables. Particularly with cables that are included with motherboards, they often have no locking latch (optional) brittle plastic ends, and will pop off with the slightest touch even if you seat them perfectly.

Since you don't have anything important on the drive you don't have anything to lose by testing it. You can download the seagate diagnostic program here, you will want the dos boot cd version. Run the short test and if it passes that run the long test. If it fails either test send the drive into seagate for a warranty replacement.