bad luck or bad disk controller??

[Vesper8]

hi all... so this is driving me up the walls... i have had SO MANY hard drives fail for me over the last year... I just can't believe it can be bad luck !!!

maxtors, seagates.. and now i have finally gotten WD replacements.. Just to give you an idea... I had my WD 320gb sata2 replaced by a WD 320gb sata2 RAID edition (supposed to be hot stuff), and it FAILED 2 days later !!!!

so I had it replaced by another identical model.. as well as a maxtor that had failed.. so I got TWO brand new out of the box WD 320gb sata2 RAID edition and OMG one failed within 5 days... major ****** up with tons.. TONS of bad sectors.. and the other one only has 4kb of bad sectors.. but it is still there! and I know it will fail completely soon if I don't RMA it again!

I monitor my HD temp and they are always cool! when this happened their temps were at a mere 26 degrees! I got a super fast fan blowing air on them from the outside.. and it blows really fast trust me..

so I'm at a loss.. could it be my motherboard disk controller? Is it possible that it would work.. a lot of the time but not all the time? I have 4 HDs.. one of them is a raptor and that one has never caused me a problem, I have a samsung which is also problem-less.. and then the other two which keep failing no matter what I try..

or could it be the cables ? I've twisted the cables a lot and tied em with a tie-strap thingy caz they're too long.. could that cause it?

and that darn WD Diagnostic tool always says it's found bad sectors that may be repairable and then I click 'repair' and it always gives an immediate error.. lame

please.. any advice anyone ??

 

[natto fire]

You didn't mention PSU.

That would be the first thing to check.

 

[Vesper8]

my PSU is a 500w seasonic.. I never had any problems with it as far as I can tell...

I do have a lot of stuff in my computer.. but according to a power calculator.. my psu should still be able to deliver enough juice for it all.. also when the bad sectors occur I am not doing things like playing games or burning discs.. so there really isn't that much pulling juice.

what tests do you recommend? caz at first glance.. nothing seems fishy about my psu

 

[Matthias99]

It's almost impossible for you to have gotten that many bad drives. Not totally impossible, but very very unlikely. It is much more likely that something is wrong with your system.

Are you overclocking? Does your system pass stability tests like memtest86 and Prime95? Do you have these problems if you run everything at stock, or below stock?

Are your internal case temperatures/airflow good? If your chipset or CPU/RAM are running too hot, it could cause instability.

If you're consistently seeing problems on only certain drives -- are they on the same controller/cable? Same ports on the MB? Same PSU connector? Isolate the common factors and you'll find the problem.

 

[Vesper8]

no OCing whatsoever actually.. I got a good airflow in my system with lots of fans including a crossflow fan that blows air on the ram.. which already has excellent heatsinks on it. On the HDs especially I got a real leaf blower that keeps em at an average of 23 degrees.

i don't always re-use the same cables/ports on the same drives but mostly I do.. isn't there another means of testing the disk controller for this kind of stability issues?

ill tell you one thing I know i'm doing that must be hurting.. is I download a hell of a lot of torrents and sometimes I probably overwork my drives.. but then again I had a drive cause a bad sector and I was only downloading a single torrent on that one at the time.. and it was brand new and kept very cool.

thanks a lot for your advice though.. i have no idea how to solve this enigma.. i wish there was a way to test the controller for consistency/stability..

 

[SparkyJJO]

Maxtor - suspect drives to begin with if not kept cool enough.
WD - susptect to me, they almost always died on me.
Seagate - not a suspect drive, unless it was the 7200.8 series which had more problems than the other series.

 

[Jiggz]

With the number of fans in your case, I wonder if it could be the vibration in your case. Sure a hdd is designed to withstand certain amount of G's but not when the read arm is in transit or moving. Try suspending the hdd or better yet just let the hdd lay on a rubber foam. Then let us know if the problem persists.

 

[Matthias99]

don't always re-use the same cables/ports on the same drives but mostly I do.. isn't there another means of testing the disk controller for this kind of stability issues?

Set Scandisk to run full surface scans very frequently?

You can't really test the controller directly -- you have to write data, then read it back and make sure it's correct.