• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Hard drives disappearing. PSU declining?

rsquared

rsquared

Limp Gawd
2FA
Joined
Jul 5, 2007
Messages
497
Running a Silverstone DA850 that has served me well through numerous rebuilds. Over the past several months, two of my four hard drives would sometimes disappear. It happened randomly. First I blamed it on the Lian-Li hard-drive hot-swap cage that had been around for very many rebuilds, and got a new one. That didn't help. Then I blamed it on the motherboard (a Maximus IV Extreme), the SATA controller must be failing.

New motherboard, all was well. Now it's happening again. Same drives, same problem. When it happened again today I could hear a drive like it was struggling to spin up. Whirrrrclick. Whirrrrrclick. This has gotten me wonder if the power supply is insufficient. I'd think that 850W should be fine, but maybe this power supply is on its way out?

Specs are as in the sig. The three HDDs are a 500GB Velociraptor, a 750GB Caviar Black, and a 2TB Caviar Green. The liquid cooling is a Swiftech MCP35X. Four radiator fans (BitFenix Spectre) and two case fans (one more Spectre and one Scythe "Slip Stream").

Any suggestions? Can anyone confirm or deny 850W is enough for my build?
 
Run CrystalDiskInfo to see if any of the drives believe they are behaving abnormally,
 
850W is more than enough for this system which requires 450 ~ 500W.

Given that the Silverstone has been used for sometime, it is suspected that the PSU is possibly failing and going out of spec (voltages/currents not as per original spec). In turn this may be causing problems and/or even (slowly) damaging the motherboard and other components.

If possible, try swapping out this PSU for another good (working) one and see what happens.

It might be a good idea to retire the Silverstone unit anyway, and get a new PSU.
 
CrystalDiskInfo reports all is well. (I was mildly disappointed to find it's just a SMART reporter.) I ran WD's test software on the drives back when the disappearing-drives first showed and all was well then, too. Maybe I'll run it again in case the drives might be deteriorating.

I'm actually on the third set of SATA cables since the disappearing-drives problem first started. Replacing the cables was one of my early attempts at a fix (in large part because it was inexpensive). When that didn't help, I replaced the hard-drive hot-swap cage (which was not so inexpensive). I've also tried switching out the power-supply cables, in case I'd happened to use a bad one from the PSU to the hard-drive cage (the Silverstone is fully modular).

I'm leaning toward it being a power-supply problem both because of the other things I've tried, and because the two drives always dropped out simultaneously (but it was the "whirrrrclick" that really persuaded me). A reboot used to always get them back, but in the past week this started to not be so—a couple reboots have left me stuck at an "insert boot device" prompt. And Windows 8 has crashed with CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED a few times in that same period.
 
If you already swapped the SATA cables then I'd do as brispuss suggested and try swapping out the power supply. If you've used it for a couple of builds then it might be time to simply replace it anyway :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top