SATA Hard Drive Problems

[Naren Parker]

Hi Guys

My rig's an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ on an MSI RS480M2-IL motherboard with 2.5 GB RAM of which 128MB is shared by the onboard ATi Radeon Xpress 200 graphics chipset. I have a 120GB SATA hard disk on which Windows XP SP3 is installed and another 40GB IDE hard drive for my working data. My SMPS rating is 400W. I recently purchased a Seagate 500GB ST3500820AS 7200.11 SATA hard drive. The problem is that the drive did not complete the Full Format in Windows Disk Manager. It stuck at 4% and after a very long time went till 24% and suddenly the drive disappeared from the list !!. I checked the internal connections once again and this time the drive did not get detected in the BIOS but when I reconnected everything, the drive showed up and I quick formatted it. Files seemed to copy fine until recently when I started noticing that the performance is not upto the mark. File copying takes its own time even for small files. SMART tests showed signs of failure. I want to know how to remedy this. This is the second time this has happened. I got this drive after I had replaced a previous one due to the same problem. I had to send even this drive for replacement. Is there anything wrong with my system? The toll free number of Seagate is re-directing me to a Voice Mailbox after which the call disconnects.

I want to know whether this problem is in a specific batch of manufactured drives or with my system itself because even the earlier replacement has failed. Please advise so that I can take steps to ensure that the new replacement will not go kaput like this. I need the space for taking backups of crucial data.

Hope somebody helps...

Thanks all in advance...

 

[pimpom]

One possible suspect is the HDD power connector. Does the connector come out straight from the PSU or are you using a SATA power supply adaptor ?

 

[Naren Parker]

The cable doesn't come directly from the PSU. I use a SATA power adaptor / converter. It has about 2 joints en route to the hard drive. Could that potentially cause problems? My older 120 GB hard drive and also my Lite-On SATA DVD Writer also are connected to the PSU output via SATA power converters.

 

[pimpom]

Using an adaptor is no problem by itself. But theremight be an imperfect contact where the adaptor connects to the molex pins. I've seen this happen.

Pull and push each of the four wires separately and see if one or more feels just a little bit loose at the male-to-female plug joint.

 

[Naren Parker]

Will check right away. Can you think of any other causes for the consecutive failures? The full formatting didn't happen even when I tried to install Vista on the new hard drive. It gave me an error and Setup closed. At that time I disconnected the other hard drives. And why does the entry in the Disk Manager disappear in the midst of formatting?? Also, after doing a quick format, I installed Adobe Reader 9 on the new disk. It seemed to work fine for quite a few days and when I tried un-installing the program, my monitor went blank and was repeatedly switching on and off. The display came back when I disconnected the new hard disk and when I re-connected it, it did not show up in the BIOS. Can someone kindly explain what may be wrong???

Checked the power contacts. They seem to be fine enough.

 

[raj_v1982]

change the power cable and the sata data cable.