Laptop keeps killing hard drives

[v8_h8r]

Friend brought me his laptop to fix and I narrowed it down to the hard drive. Replaced it and it worked fine all night last night at work. He takes it home and turns it on and the hard drive has gone out on it again. This has happened 3 times now.

Now, he lost the original power cord and power brick so he bought one off of ebay and it has the correct voltage but the amps are a bit lower like 3.42 when it's supposed to be 3.95, could this be causing the hard drives to fail? I've never seen anything like it in my 12 years working on PC's and it's the only thing I can think of.

 

[mwroobel]

When it comes to cheap no-name chinese power supplies (ATX or Laptop or even iPhone) you truly get what you pay for. Here is why you don't buy no-name chargers on ebay. You can also read A Long comparison of name and no-name chargers. Electronics are very much GIGO, garbage in garbage out. It all starts with the electricity and if that is faulty nothing is guaranteed.

 

[Ocellaris]

Friend brought me his laptop to fix and I narrowed it down to the hard drive. Replaced it and it worked fine all night last night at work. He takes it home and turns it on and the hard drive has gone out on it again. This has happened 3 times now.

Now, he lost the original power cord and power brick so he bought one off of ebay and it has the correct voltage but the amps are a bit lower like 3.42 when it's supposed to be 3.95, could this be causing the hard drives to fail? I've never seen anything like it in my 12 years working on PC's and it's the only thing I can think of.

Poor power delivery can cause dang near anything inside a PC to fail. Once you start feeding junk power into the motherboard, the motherboard can't always produce clean output for the attached components.

With that eBay power brick not even having the correct amp rating, it could be overworking and this would just make the problem worse.

 

[v8_h8r]

What I thought, thanks for the input guys. I'll let him know.

 

[grogthegreat]

I had this happen to a guy at my work twice last week! I've now got a 3rd HDD in there! I was also thinking I've never even heard of this before in the IT field. It is a E6510 laptop and the built in Dell diagnostics report no issues.

 

[odditory]

Poor power delivery can cause dang near anything inside a PC to fail. Once you start feeding junk power into the motherboard, the motherboard can't always produce clean output for the attached components.

With that eBay power brick not even having the correct amp rating, it could be overworking and this would just make the problem worse.

This guy knows what he speaks. Besides heat, bad/incorrect power supplies and loose power connectors are the main killers of harddisks in my experience. Power supplies can become seriously schizophrenic and start glitching out if they're overworked or have weak components somewhere along the signal chain or are just junk to begin with.

I'd lay money that the A/C adapter is the culprit. But could also be a loose connector or cracked trace on the laptop motherboard somewhere after being dropped too many times or shoved into a fisher price easy bake oven by overactive children that need tasering.