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Ok heres my situation

Bought an 80GB hard drive back in march so its less than ayear old. It started to slow down dramatically (7200 RPM) and so I did the usual, ya know defrag scandisk and it was still realllllly slow.

So wuddya know it started to fail smart drive detected it then it just went kapooie. I'm in the process of getting a RMA and meanwhile

I put my spare 15 gigger 7200RPM in there and less than a couple of weeks later windows won't start up and its giving me the same problems the 80gig did right before it failed! by the way the "symptoms" as I'll call em before it fails are: takes 5-10 minutes to start up (used to take 20 seconds), programs crash or go not responding ALL the time, and it gets slower and slower till the programs cause a blue screen of death and windows restarts.

right now my 15gig is to the point where windows will start up then automaticly keep restarting like when you hit the automatic restart button without shuttind down which can't be good for the system.

So my question is since I no longer believe that this is just a hard drive problem I'm having but rather something thats causing the hard drives serious problems:
What is causing these hard drives to crash?

looked inside the case for critters?

if there is another HD installed i would check for a virus

if no other HD I would check power supply - they go bad and can create odd problems

might also be the HDD controller - hard to test that though, unless you have a pci hdd around or another mobo

sounds like a pain!

It could be the power supply it's also less than a year old tho

I had that problem a week ago. I had three drives installed and WinXP was taking any where up to 15 minutes to boot up I found the twospare drives were partially unplugged on the IDE cables.

Are those drives manufactured by IBM? If so, theres your problem..IBM makes horribly unreliable POS drives. One of mine failed 3 days ago.

Replace your ribbon cables. They build up corrosion over time. Check you power cables goin to the drives. A loose power pin will cause the drive to behave erratically and corrupt it.

NEVER connect a HDD to one of those pass-through jumpers uses on case or heat sink fans. Invariably those jumpers use cheap connectors - you can usually see the molex pins wiggle around freely when they're not plugged in. ALWAYS plug a hard drive DIRECTLY to a power supply cable with nothing in between.

NEVER connect a HDD to one of those pass-through jumpers uses on case or heat sink fans. Invariably those jumpers use cheap connectors - you can usually see the molex pins wiggle around freely when they're not plugged in. ALWAYS plug a hard drive DIRECTLY to a power supply cable with nothing in between.

oops.....I guess I'll have to check on that I'm almost sure I got my HSF molex pass through on there, I don't think it's the ribbon cables though I just bought 4 brand new rounded cables less than a few weeks ago since I got my case modded with three windows, those old flat ribbon cables just weren't cutting it.

And no they aren't IBM hehe I'm not that retarded Maxtor Diamondplus 80gb 7200RPM and the other one was a 15GB 7200.