Recently my PCs been crashing ALOT, always when accessing the harddrive, when I reboot it gets stuck detecting harddrives for ages, if I turn it off and on again its usualy fine (either fine, or needs reformat/reinstall). I wasn't too fussed about this until it just ate my Vice City save file by crashing mid-save. Is it just that my harddrives dying? Or could it be something more serious like a mobo problem?
Does it make a "clicking" sound? I remember the last HD that died on me started clicking, and it turned out it was the head hitting the platter. Thank god for Western Digital's RMA policy. 3 weeks later, new hd
No, I don't thinks its clicking or making strange noises. The drive I think might be dying is my 18gig WD Protege, its had a year and a half of pretty-much nonstop use so I was kinda expecting it to go. The other drive I'm using is a 12GB Fujitsu something-or-other I took from an old PC. Swap file is on this drive, so I might try moving this to make sure this drive isn't causing the crashes. Another thought... I'm currenty using a cheapo 300W PSU that came with a £20 case. The bios is telling me the 12V line is running at 12.8V, is this high enough to be killing the hdd?
Try attaching that HDD to another computer. Also try attaching another HDD to your crashing computer and see what happens. Did you overclock the CPU or GPU? That could be a problem for it being unstable. I never had stability problems due to my HDD, it should be possible, yet unlikely. Check for corrupted files, scandisk the drive and try listening for wierd noises. Also check the temperature of the drive. Normally if HDDs fail, they fail completely or contain damaged sectors, etc. Oh, before I forget: check the power connection to the drive! If it has a loose wire or short circuit it could disrupt the power to the drive, causing it to reset and crashing the computer (happened to my dad once).
Processor is slightly overclocked (thats what you get for trying to run a duron on a 166MHz bus ) but i'm pretty sure its not whats causing the crashes. Could be the wires, i'll give it a check in a second, but shaking them with the PC on made something buzz. It may well be the heat, one of the harddrives is almost too hot to touch, I s'pose I better turn on the case fans.
If you shake the power connector and you can hear the drive respin, that is your problem. Heat should not be all to important, yet a possibility. What type of drives are you running?
I shook the cables some more, i think the noise was buzzing because it rocked the hdd (this case can only hold the drives from one side, thers a half inch gap on the far side), it didn't sound like it spinning up. I minute ago when fiddling with the fans I did hear one of the harddrives make a weird sounds... it wasn't really a clicking more of a Cullunk,,,,,clink and din't repeat. I'll leave the panel off and see if it happens often. The drives are: WD 18GB Protege, ATA100 Fujitsu (I don't know model) which is old, 8GB, I think this is ATA66. On the other channel is just a CDDrive.
does it freeze whenever you access the pagefile? I found mine was freezing when I was doing anything from minimizing an internet explorer window, to using 100% cpu load. I wondered what it was, then bang, the hard drive failed... Mine was a Seagate Barracuda IV
I think it does... alt tabbing tends to set it off, but loading things ingame also crashes it sometimes... dunno if this would fiddle the pagefile at all. I've moved pagefile to a different harddrive to see if it helps atall.
from what you're saying, and my recent experience, I'd say to make a backup of everything, as sooner or later you'll get a BSOD saying "unaccessable boot device" or something similar I lost everything, I'd hate it for someone else to lose the amount of work I lost
There are reports from integrators of (real) problems with hard drives made recently in China, and RMA figures are not good in general for hard drives. Their quality isn't so great. Serial-ATA might offer a carrot in price, but also in return manufactures might put back some of the warranty & process quality control that they took out re compete on price. o If your data isn't backed up, consider it in RAM o Data backups should be to 2 different media types ---- ideally one being optical ---- since tape is not a brilliantly reliable backup medium DAT in particular falls under that last category. Using 2 different media forces 2 different backup devices, since there's always the chance you got the duff one Remember, if you data capacity needs aren't big, 9-18-36GB then the SCSI solutions are not very expensive really: o Simple LSI Logic Ultra 160 card is 25ukp/35$US o Mylex RAID-5 with i960 CPU is only ~120ukp o SCSI disks in 9GB & 18GB are "reasonable" in price ---- and yet offer 3yr or even 5yr warranties - that's good Increasingly people are using RAID-1 to make IDE reliable, and h/w solutions don't offer much if anything over s/w. Realise h/w RAID-1 perversely can be higher CPU-load & lower speed than s/w RAID-1 from many cards. IDE RAID-5 is generally extremely poor in performance, with only the 3ware offering ok performance at a higher price. The same applies to the cheaper Adaptec RAID-5 SCSI cards too. Just some thoughts. -- Dorothy Bradbury http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dorothy.bradbury/panaflo.htm
Thanks for the suggestions. BigZ, i'm currently backing up over network... hopefully it won't finnaly kill the harddrive . jafb2000, both my drives are old, and probelly out of warrenty, but i'll bare that in mind when I enivtably have to replace them
Problem drives were made in China, those made in Japan were ok. It did affect Maxtor, Seagate but not Western Digital drives. Just something to be on the look out for, IDE hard drives from Fujitsu to IBM in recent years have had their "adventures". Buying hard drives should not be an adventure -- DB.
