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PSU killing hard drive?

I

Innocence

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 9, 2001
Messages
2,604
Just got an old VPN/firewall pulled out of a remote branch at work, using it as a personal file server now. It's a PIII550 loaded with XP SP2 (stripped down).

Current hardware:
PIII 550 (slot 1, 5.5x100)
2x 128MB PC100
10GB Fujitsu HDD (OS)
2x 80GB Maxtor HDDs
10/100 NIC
Old ATI AGP (rage 128 i think)

All this is on an OEM 200W PSU. It killed one of the 80GB drives in just under a week. shows no other instability. I'm going to assume it was just a bad drive, but before I go and put the replacement in I figured I would ask.
 
well unlike a mobo there is no "buffer" to a HDD
the mobo has a certain amount of voltage regulation

that said the drives & fans are the only devices likely powered off the +12V in that config
so it wouldnt be instability induced by a variable load of the other components (at least on the same rail)

HDDs are awful fragile, and a drive that has some miles on it might be more suceptible to the odd bump in transit, Id recommend logging the +12V rail with MBM if you can
unfortunately when its going to see the greatest draw and thus instability will be before the OS boots at spinup and thus not loggable with software, to observe that youd need a Multimeter

if its out of spec in software,yod definately want to try to determine if its software calibration or actually out of spec (again with a DMM)
 
Back in the day I killed many HDDs using cheap PSUs. Since I switched to only using high quality PSUs I have not had a single drive failure in the last 4 years. Before that drives would usually only last about a year.
 
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