Re: SATA controller or bad hdds? (long post)

The message <fj9oip$1gfe$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from harikeo <nomail@xxxxxxxx> contains these words:

All

Over the past couple of months I've been through 3 500GB WD drives with
all of them dying in the same way after about the same length of time.
I'm able to return the drive for replacement but I'd like to know if
other people think it could be a motherboard fault.

Specs:

MSI K9N Neo
Athlon 64x2 5200+ AM2
2GB Corsair TWIN2X 6400C4 DDR2
Sapphire Radeon X1300XT 512MB DDR2
40GB WD SATA (Vista Ultimate)
500GB SATAII Samsung (store for DVDs and recorded TV)
500GB USB WD MY Book (Backup of data etc)
Hauppauge! WinTV-NOVA-T-500 (dual tuner)

The 500GB WD drive which has just died was on the same controller as the
OS is connected to and it was configured to be used by Media Centre as
the recorded TV storage.

What happens when I add a new drive is that for a week or so everything
is fine but then for no apparent reason Windows starts to freeze for up
to a minute or more. This could be nvstor32 as I see errors in Event
Viewer of:

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.


Once things start to freeze the drive becomes unreliable with recorded
tv being written over bad blocks. I ran WD Lifeguard and it came back on
one drive with Error 08 (WD say to return the drive) and the latest
drive the result came back as, "too many bad blocks to continue".

At the moment the drive is connected but is not visible to Windows. When
I reboot the drive becomes visible for a minute or so but then it
disappears and Event Viewer has an entry of:

The device 'WDC WD50 00AAKS-00YGA SCSI Disk Device'
(SCSI\Disk&Ven_WDC_WD50&Prod_00AAKS-00YGA\4&3c65720&0&010100)
disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.



Okay I have another dead drive but what could be the cause? Am I just
unlucky in getting 3 bad WD drives in a row or could the controller on
the motherboard be the cause? Don't forget the OS is on the same
controller and has no problems. Would a bad controller cause physical
damage to a drive? Is it possible that the nvstor32 issue is causing the
hard drive to develop physical faults if it's being reset when it's in use?

Have you monitored the drive temperatures? Did it ever exceed 55 deg C
(or possibly 60 deg C, the new upper limit now commonly being specified
for the current crop of drives)?

Do you have the WD stacked above the Samsung in the "Drive Bay"?

Are you using DTemp to monitor drive temps and _NOT_ seeing any splits
in temp readouts? If so, be very suspicious of the temp reading for the
hotter drive (that will be the top one being cooked by the bottom one).

I suppose it's just possible that you've had a series of WDs from a
batch of Bad drives but the fact that they last a week or so before
going bad suggests the bad batch isn't down to the usual 'damage in
transit' type of badness.

The controller is unlikely to be the cause.



--
Regards, John.

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