Is it my hard drive or psu ???

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ryu

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Hi guys

I recently installed 2 new drives to my home pc (toshiba 6tb * 2), after a month of use i noticed the second drive i installed wasnt picking up under my pc, i hadnt had time to sort it out until last night.

so i took out the cables to the second drive and used another power cable and another sata cable
When i booted up the drive appeared! Yay :D or so i thought ...
about 10 minutes later the drive goes off again :(

so is it my psu or the hard drive itself (its newish about 3 month old and although its been installed and left on i havent copied anything to it as yet)

My home pc is for media and downloading only, i dont play games on it or have a hectic GPU just an old one (i forget the model now)

the pc has 4 internal drives including the 2 new ones, about 3 case fans so thats why i'm thinking maybe its the psu
the psu is a raidmax 500w or 550w tru something psu, its about 6 years old so is the pc

So is it the psu or hdd, how can i find out for sure which one is at fault, i dont have another psu or external hdd case to test out either
 
eish i'll have to go look, built this thing a while ago forgot most of what i put in there
 
Your power usage should be fine if your PSU is working properly, but because of its age and quality (Raidmax peasant :p) you definitely want to make sure it is not the problem. Do you have access to another PSU that you can put into the system?

Your hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. data will give you a rough idea of its health. https://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/
You could also take out the other new drive and see if it does the same thing.
 
Do you know what processor it is?

According to the above site, an i5-2500, 4 HDDs, 3x120mm case fans, GTX560, KB mouse screen etc would be using around 342W under load. Obviously this is total thumb suck because we don't know specific devices, but342W for a 500W cheap PSU which is 6 years old may be getting on the hairy side.
 
The toshiba x300 use 11W of power, cant be a power issue.


PS, where did you manage to buy Toshiba HDD's? Externals are rare in SA.
 
Rickster said:
The toshiba x300 use 11W of power, cant be a power issue.


PS, where did you manage to buy Toshiba HDD's? Externals are rare in SA.
Click to expand...

Not a large power draw but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. It wasn't a great PSU to begin with, now its 6 years old.
 
UrBaN963 said:
Not a large power draw but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. It wasn't a great PSU to begin with, now its 6 years old.
Click to expand...

6x11W (worst case) 66W, not a lot really.

500W - 66W =434 - 80W (old age) =354 for CPU, RAM, fans, old gpu. Should be enough.

The rail might be overloaded.
 
EDIT: IIRC the cpu should be i5 3570, mobo is foxconn, 16gb ram
1 * 750GB (c drive) the 1* 4TB and 2*6TB (the toshiba x300)

i should mention i ran out of power cables for the sata drives so i purchased these extenders that convert the old 4 hole module thing into sata power cables ... i can only imagine how dumb i sound right now :p

but yeah i'll take out one of the older drives and see if it picks up the new drive then i'll know for sure its the psu i guess
once the drive shows up i'll run that SMART drive check to see if the drive is okay
 
Last edited:
ryu said:
i should mention i ran out of power cables for the sata drives so i purchased these extenders that convert the old 4 hole module thing into sata power cables ... i can only imagine how dumb i sound right now :p
Click to expand...
Yip, my bet. These power extension are frequently unreliable.
 
update:

i took out one of my existing drives (4tb internal) and used that power cable on my 6tb toshiba drive, it picked up on start up but it slowed my pc down to a crawl.

i also couldn't successfully copy anything over to that drive.

I then downloaded hard disk sentinel and scanned my drives, the overview on the toshiba wasnt great :

performance was 100%
Health was 9% (critical)

power on time was only 15 hours! (i installed this thing in june and my pc basically stays on 24/7 so looks like it failed the day after installation and guess i just never picked it up)

estimated remaining lifetime: 24 days :erm:
total start/stop count: 28

additional info:

There are 1248 bad sectors on the disk surface. the contents of these sectors were moved to the spare area
Based on the number of remapping operations, the bad sectors may form continuous areas.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.

It is recommended to backup immediately to prevent data loss.
Click to expand...

So i guess its definitely the hard drive then :o

Edit: i called the online shop this morning to arrange a return, they will check the device and said it will either be repaired or something ... probably just be replaced i'm hoping.

all my other drives are fine according to sentinel except for one 4tb external :( guess i'll have to replace that as well as its out of warranty.
 
Last edited:
ryu said:
performance was 100%
Health was 9% (critical)
Click to expand...

Interesting because Toshiba statistically make the most reliable drives, could have been dropped at some point (not by you) or it was a bad batch.
 
ryu said:
update:

i took out one of my existing drives (4tb internal) and used that power cable on my 6tb toshiba drive, it picked up on start up but it slowed my pc down to a crawl.

i also couldn't successfully copy anything over to that drive.

I then downloaded hard disk sentinel and scanned my drives, the overview on the toshiba wasnt great :

performance was 100%
Health was 9% (critical)

power on time was only 15 hours! (i installed this thing in june and my pc basically stays on 24/7 so looks like it failed the day after installation and guess i just never picked it up)

estimated remaining lifetime: 24 days :erm:
total start/stop count: 28

additional info:

There are 1248 bad sectors on the disk surface. the contents of these sectors were moved to the spare area
Based on the number of remapping operations, the bad sectors may form continuous areas.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.

It is recommended to backup immediately to prevent data loss.

So i guess its definitely the hard drive then :o

Edit: i called the online shop this morning to arrange a return, they will check the device and said it will either be repaired or something ... probably just be replaced i'm hoping.

all my other drives are fine according to sentinel except for one 4tb external :( guess i'll have to replace that as well as its out of warranty.
Click to expand...

Woohoo new hard drive!
 
i'm just thanking my luck stars i didnt actually use the drive so i'm not losing anything
the other 6tb returned a perfect score so hopefully it will last.
 
Be weary of the power extension cable as well. I had one that was fine for a long time then one rainy day, I plugged an old 1tb drive using that extension and poof, drive dead. I then connected an 80gb drive with bad sectors to a different connector and it worked as expected. Plugged it into the extender and it promptly died as well.
 
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