After Drive Failure - Any way to figure out why?

AdmiralJonB

AdmiralJonB

AdmiralJonB

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Joined
14 Mar 2007
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15
Hi

There's a computer in the house I'm living in that keeps having it's hard drives fail. I've been told that today they all failed. I'm trying to narrow down the reasons as to why this keeps happening.

The door to my bedroom which is on the same wall on the floor below where this computer sits, can slam quite heavily and shake the house when I accidently let it slip when the window slips open, and I think the owner of this pc thinks this is quite likely the reason as to why his hard drives keep failing. While the house does shake heavily, his is the only computer to have hard drives failing so I'm not too certain of this.

Is there any way that I might be able to try and track down what actually is the problem, or is the only thing that we can do is take preventative measures in the future? Does anyone have any ideas what could cause such a recurring problem?

Sorry for the long tale! Thanks for reading it.
 
Hi

I think while its possible for the drives to be failing from shock its HIGHLY unlikely, it would be interesting to know what type of failures the drives are having, I'd be looking into the PSU, which without looking at it, is probably some generic Chinese 300W PSU which weighs about 150g??? Maybe not, but a dodgy PSU that gives bad voltages can kill of components and the HDD takes power straight from it unlike RAM and CPU which get power from the mobo, in my experience while a power cut might not kill a HDD a dodgy or under-spec PSU will kill them overtime. The only other thing I have seen is a bad controller causing data errors by giving the drive screwed up commands, but I haven’t seen that for about 8 years
 
I doubt it's the doors... I can't see that they'll pass sufficient shock to the HDs to cause them to fail. I'd suspect the PSU. If it's not providing stable power, voltage spikes could eventually damage the hard drives. The only other thing I can think of is that it might be really hot in the case. HDs do have maximum recommended temperatures, although it's generally quite hard to reach them.
 
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