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WTF?

Anyone ever see anything like this? This is the THIRD SATA drive I've installed on this system. The first two were Seagate OEM 160Gb drives from Dell. The first drive lasted 3 months, the 2nd failed in 2 weeks and this latest one - a 250Gb Retail Seagate - is only a month old.

I just rebooted and it's making pinging noises accompanied by the computer freezing during the pings (the other two drives did the same thing). I just rebooted and ran chkdsk which repaired tons of damage and I'm up and running now, but if this follows the past pattern the drive will continue to deteriorate from here on in.

Whatever is happening it's DEFINATELY damaging the drives. I tested the other two 160Gb drives on a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT computer before sending them out for RMA, and ran the Dell and Seagate HDD diagnostics on them which failed them.

So my only conclusion is that my workstation is KILLING SATA drives (I had a 160Gb EIDE drive in here originally which ran fine for almost a year and I'm ready to go back to an EIDE drive now).

I have the Asus Probe voltage monitor running and the 12 and 5 volt rail ar rock solid within 5%. I've also confirmed this with a digital meter, so I don't think it's the PSU (an Antec Tru-Power 430).

I'm running an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo which is a ROCK.

All three drives were Seagates but Seagates are solid drives. I could POSSIBLY imagine the two 160Gb Dell OEMs being crappy drives even if they are Seagates, but not a retail 250Gb Seagate drive.

Anyone ever see anything like this? I'm totally lost. Short of installing an EIDE drive and praying, I have no clue as to what's going on.

Wow! That is really strange. I've never had a SATA drive so I can't comment on their quality or lack of quality. I still use IDE for storage and SCSI for the boot drive.

I have only had / still have one, and it is fine.

I've seen a power supply kill HDs. It took me replacing 2 before I figured out what was causing it.

I just can't see it being the PSU. It's rock stable. I dunno... wouldn't kill me to swap it out I guess.

maybee a bad SATA chipset? What kind of chipset on the SATA controller? can you do a BIOS flash to see if that helps?

got me, I ran my 2 120 seagates for over a year. Just swapped them out today for 2 250's...Im now worried.

Greg

Well so far the drive is behaving, so maybe it was a paranoid aberation. I went ahead and ordered a couple of those nice Enermax Noisetaker EG425P-VE's (one for this rig and one for the new LAN party rig I haven't sat down to build yet).

I really don't think there's anything wrong with this PSU, but it wouldn't hurt to get a more modern, quieter PSU in there, and considering I'm running an x800 a "dual 12v rail" PSU sounds like a good thing.

Sheesh, I just went through my parts shelf and I can't believe how many spare PSUs I have. I'm one of those people that ALWAYS installs a new PSU on a new rig and never recycle an old one except for non-mission critical rigs. I should probbaly sell some of these off. I have 2 Antec 330W TruePowers and 2 Antec 480 TruePowers. Nice PSUs except they don't have SATA connectors, but adapters are cheap.

i'm sure you have already checked, but is the dell case fan working properly? the only thing that could be killing them would be voltage (that you checked) and possibly heat. all of the dell drives i have had worked fine...come to think of it...i haven't had a personal/home drive fail on me yet, except a laptop one (but that doesn't count since i hate laptops...hehehe).

.02

This is not a Dell. The original two 160Gb drives were Dell OEM drives.

ah...i thought you were talking about the dell server you got a few months back.

yea, I have an insane amount of PS's as well.

I end up giving them away to people usually.

Greg

It's the 160Gb SATA out of the Dell 420 server I bought a few months ago. I was using it in my main workstation. Since I had two fail on me, and I had assumed (still not sure) that they were both bad, I decided to put the last RMA replacement back in the server and I bought a 250Gb SATA for the main workstation which is what is in there now.