Is this normal?

R

Raap

Gawd
Joined
Jul 12, 2008
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I built my current system a few years ago and bought 2x150GB Raptor drives as well as one 500GB storage disk which brand I can't remember. Anyway, after 6 months or so, the Raid I was using on the Raptor drives would start to act up. As it got progressively worse, I eventually took them out and checked them one by one only to find that one of them was dead or near-death. Fast forward one year and the second Raptor started messing up as well, eventually giving out completely.

Then, half a year ago, I bought four new disks, 3x320GB WD R03 disks which I put into a raid which has been working very well, and one 2GB WD Caviar Green. And now the 2GB drive has started acting up.

I'm not entirely sure it's gone yet; Intel RST isn't reporting any SMART problems(yet), but it will at most work for a few minutes at a time before it 'stops' and often messes up the sound and halts any programs using it. Usually it will recover again after a few minutes, but it's become next to useless in its current state. Event viewer reports these cases as "The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period.".

Anyway, assuming then that that disk is gone too, that leaves me with 3 dead disks, 2 within half a year and the third within 1.5 years, out of a total of 7 disks. Before all of this started, I'd had a total of 0 disks crashing on me. I still have a 40GB disk in an older computer which is running in its 10th year or something as well as a 120GB disk or so which is on its 6th year. Both have been used extensively for many years.

So what's going on here? Is this actually normal for WD disks or have I just been extremely unlucky?
 
Don't really think so. I had some video card problems before the first drives started going faulty and checked my PSU at that time. It seemed to work perfectly fine, and the video card(9800X2) problem turned out to be the SLI-bridge between the sandwiched cards. The only other problems I've been having are related to my drives.

The PSU is a 850W CoolerMaster unit that came integrated with my tower, pretty sure it's of a decent quality.
 
As much as I like WD, their Green 1.5 and 2TB drives have had a surprisingly large failure rate, as have their larger Black drives.

The Blue drives tend to be rock solid and have never had a problem, and the Green and Black drives that are 1TB or smaller are great as well.

But honestly OP, it really does sound like a PSU issue. Have you dusted it out lately or cleaned it?

Not to say HDDs can't die, but that is an unusual amount of good drives that have started to die and the first place I would look is the PSU.
 
Yeah, it should be nice and clean and the case is generally cool. Also seems odd that only the HDDs would be affected, and only after some time, if it was the PSU. My current video card(5870) has been running for over a year, and you'd think that would be more prone to show errors from a bad PSU than a HDD would( unless, I guess, only the HDD connections/supply was problematic, I'm not sure how the whole PSU thing works).

Then again, the 500GB (Seagate I think) storage drive I bought at the same time as the Raptors is still in the system and running nicely. The 2TB Green has about 900GB free at the moment, and I recently downloaded lots of stuff, so I've been considering deleting some of it to possibly 'get it back into the working sectors' if such a thing is possible; playing some of the first movies I put on the disk actually seems to work nicely now that I tried it, but copying new things over or using recently-copied stuff seems to cause it to crash.

Definitely getting rather tired of this whole mess though; always a hassle to switch HDDs and copy stuff back( if at all possible). But on the bright side, maybe it'll get me to waste some cash on some hopefully-working SSDs instead.
 
Well SATA HDDs use 12v, 5v, and 3.3v rails, and if the PSU had dirty energy (from a non-clean source or outlet) it may affect only the drives. The video card and other components may have more robust parts and circuitry to withstand the potential dirty energy (or bad PSU) a lot longer than the HDDs could, hence why they would go first.

Just a theory though, and now we can definitely rule out dust.

If I were you, I would seriously invest in a new PSU before buying any other parts, and don't skimp. ;)
Corsair and Thermaltake have very good PSUs, and PC Power & Cooling is good too.

This really sounds like a PSU with dirty energy. Double check that you have a modern (and decent) surge protector or BBU and that there is no high RF or EMF around any of the power cables if possible. Electrical noise can definitely cause hardware to go bad, especially if a cheaper PSU is used. Not saying yours is cheap, Cooler Master is normally pretty good, but it may have had an effect on it over time.
 
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