Could be heat or power supply. What PSU are you using? The boot drive is going to work a lot harder than the storage drive with swap file acces and accessing the OS files it needs.
Hard Drives Keep Failing? Help! :)
Hi,
I seem to have an odd problem where it appears that my primary HDDs keep failing. I have gone through at least 3 or 4 hard disks in as many years already, and now a new one that I bought only a few months ago has started clicking and freezing up and it's getting ridiculous now. What could be causing this? I'm running out of explanations! I run 2 hard disks in my computer and it's only the primary ones that have been failing. I've had the secondary one in there for years and it still works fine as far as I can tell.
The current one crashed out completely the day before yesterday, and I thought it couldn't possibly be yet another failure so I started thinking of alternatives. I initially thought that it's possibly a motherboard problem as it got to the point where it froze and upon restart it woudn't detect either of the two disks in BIOS. In an act of desperation more than anything I swapped the IDE cables so now they're on a different IDE channel (I have both HD's on one IDE and my CD/DVD drive on the other one) and all of a sudden it worked again. So I thought perhaps one of the connectors on the cable had failed or the motherboard had broken on that channel or something. It worked for a couple of days, albeit slightly slower than before, but this morning it froze again. To me it sounds like a HD failure as it clicks and and always makes mechanical noises before it freezes. But it's got me stumped as to why yet another new HD is broken. As I said this one's only a couple months old and I haven't used the same manufacturer each time either.
Anyone able to help? Could it be heat perhaps? I've had to buy a better heatsink fan for my CPU already as ventillation in my case is quite poor. I also have a rather large graphics card which won't be helping things. It's a mini case when really it should be a proper sized one. The CPU is now running at good temp though, can heat cause HD failures? If this is the case why is only the primary HD failing each time and not the secondary one?
I am running Windows 7, on an MSI P7N Diamond Motherboard, Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, NVidia GeForce GTX 260.
Much appreciated
I seem to have an odd problem where it appears that my primary HDDs keep failing. I have gone through at least 3 or 4 hard disks in as many years already, and now a new one that I bought only a few months ago has started clicking and freezing up and it's getting ridiculous now. What could be causing this? I'm running out of explanations! I run 2 hard disks in my computer and it's only the primary ones that have been failing. I've had the secondary one in there for years and it still works fine as far as I can tell.
The current one crashed out completely the day before yesterday, and I thought it couldn't possibly be yet another failure so I started thinking of alternatives. I initially thought that it's possibly a motherboard problem as it got to the point where it froze and upon restart it woudn't detect either of the two disks in BIOS. In an act of desperation more than anything I swapped the IDE cables so now they're on a different IDE channel (I have both HD's on one IDE and my CD/DVD drive on the other one) and all of a sudden it worked again. So I thought perhaps one of the connectors on the cable had failed or the motherboard had broken on that channel or something. It worked for a couple of days, albeit slightly slower than before, but this morning it froze again. To me it sounds like a HD failure as it clicks and and always makes mechanical noises before it freezes. But it's got me stumped as to why yet another new HD is broken. As I said this one's only a couple months old and I haven't used the same manufacturer each time either.
Anyone able to help? Could it be heat perhaps? I've had to buy a better heatsink fan for my CPU already as ventillation in my case is quite poor. I also have a rather large graphics card which won't be helping things. It's a mini case when really it should be a proper sized one. The CPU is now running at good temp though, can heat cause HD failures? If this is the case why is only the primary HD failing each time and not the secondary one?
I am running Windows 7, on an MSI P7N Diamond Motherboard, Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, NVidia GeForce GTX 260.
Much appreciated
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It's a Seasonic S12 600W PSU. It is about 5 or 6 years old now but I bought it with futureproofing in mind. I think I may have figured it out however. It froze up completely again this afternoon, and again wouldn't detect either of the two HDDs. I opened up the computer and happened to hear that the secondary one was the one that was clicking (constantly now) and not the primary one. This would make more sense since it's a good few years old. I'm going to keep the computer running for the rest of the day with that one unplugged and see if it stays on. It is running a lot quicker again at the moment now that I've done that, and come to think of it, it happened a lot more recently when I spent a few days downloading something straight onto that disk.
What's confusing me a little however is if it is the secondary disk, which now seems likely, how come a) it freezes up the whole system even when I'm not using it, and b) how come on startup the BIOS doesn't show as detecting either of them when this happens? Can sometihng like that really cause the whole thing to effectively fail like that?
What's confusing me a little however is if it is the secondary disk, which now seems likely, how come a) it freezes up the whole system even when I'm not using it, and b) how come on startup the BIOS doesn't show as detecting either of them when this happens? Can sometihng like that really cause the whole thing to effectively fail like that?
a) whether or not you are using the drive, Windows has to maintain communication with the drive. The freezing, is Windows waiting for the drive to respond.
b) similar to above. The BIOS is checking the channel and waiting for both devices to respond.
b) similar to above. The BIOS is checking the channel and waiting for both devices to respond.
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