Not sure if this is a HDD or PSU issue

[backtothefuture]

Apologies in advance for the longish post...but....

Got an Asus a8nsli deluxe mobo, Opty 170, Hiper 500W PSU, radeon 4850, asus xonar dx , 2 Maxtors 160GB in RAID 0 and 1 WD raptor as boot drive (plus a couple of optical drives).

System is a bit over 5 years old (with the exception of the Radeon which I got about a year back )..

recently moved house so the PC was switched off for a couple of weeks... connected it up and switched it on and started having freezes after a few minutes..

one of the error messages was the the H: drive (RAID 0) was not readable.. so I disconnected one drive and switched it back on, worked fine for about half an hour then same problem...

tried reconnecting other drive and disconnecting this one but other drive seems to be dead (doesn't turn on)... so it seems I only have one working drive from the RAID 0 config and that too fails after every half hour or so (but works once I reboot)

I checked to see any loose cabling etc but didn't note anything..however touched the top of the HDD and got a mild shock!... it seems current is flowing along the top of one of the RAID HDDs (but not the other), though this one works!...

no idea whats going on with the system...

the main boot HDD works fine...

I seem to have limited use of the PC's USB ports since if I connect more than a couple of external HDDs (by USB), one of them usually fails/powers down...

Any idea of why the RAID drives failed (ing) i.e. one seems totally dead and the current issue etc?

thanks!

 

[steve258]

It could be the psu, hiper doesn't exactly have the best reliability records, especially their early type r units. I've had psu that failed to power USB hdd before but it was an el cheap case 350w unit. Are the USB hdds connected to the same USB hub? If yes does the hub have external power source? If your getting shocked touching the internals I think it just means your pc is not properly grounded. But it certainly sounds like the psu. Can you get your hands on another to test?

 

[backtothefuture]

the smaller external hdds are not externally powered.

PSU has been fine for the last 5 years...

different usb hubs fail depending on how many devices are connected to the others...
the hubs are running from the mobo or a pci card.

don't have another psu to check

Well I suppose that gives me an excuse to upgrade to a current gen system then!... only thing is not sure whether the HDDs are any good or not!

 

[droyden]

Use a non destructive hard drive test tool that will check the SMART information