Araphen

My friend is doing his first ever PC build and he's about to do the mobo test on the box (doesn't have the case yet) and he wants to see if the cpu he bought is compatible with the bios of the motherboard before the case arrives so he can know if he needs to get an older cpu to update the bios. But he's nervous about shorting the power sw pins because he thinks shorting the wrong ones or too many can damage the board. I'm like 90% sure you can't damage anything doing that but i just wanted to ask to make sure mobo is asus z690 and cpu is 13700k

I made a windows storage space from two 16TB drives then formatted them to have 1024KB allocation unit size. Since the drives are refurbs from serverpartdeals, I did a normal format (instead of quick) since it said it checks for errors. I've already had one drive arrive with faults so I'm gonna take any chance to test them. The format finished and everything looked good except the storage pool was saying it was maxed but E:\ was showing as empty in file explorer. I thought it would update given some time, use, or a restart but it's still saying it's full. As far as I can tell, there's no performance issues so it's not really a problem it's just weird and i was wondering if anyone knew what was going on.

I love this response. I didn't understand what the errors meant or why they were going away and my google-fu wasn't strong enough to find it. The errors routinely go away if I format the drive but come back once I fill it back up. And, maybe unsurprisingly, after doing that for a week straight the drive doesn't even show up in disk management now. So now I'm at least confident it failed so I'm gonna do the RMA. I wonder what the failure rate is for serverpartdeals drives. I think that would be good info to publish on their website. "RMA rates by model" sort of thing.

So if I ran a test where I filled both drives completely with random files, I should see the same errors again? I want to be sure before going through the trouble of RMA. Plus they said they'd test the RMA'd drives before issuing a replacement. Also if those problems are actually still there and multiple 2 day tests with a program designed to find faults and made by the manufacturer of the drives didn't see anything wrong with the drives, then man those programs suck.

So I've been running a lot of tests trying to reassure myself that one drive is bad and the other is good before shipping this thing back. But now it looks like both are fine??? Crystaldisk isn't seeing any errors now, and seagate's, "seatools" says both drives are fine as well (also these tests take an insanely long time. like 2 days per drive). I thought crystaldisk read smart data and smart data reported uncorrectable faults with the drive so I didn't think it could just get better by itself. All I did was break the raid, format the drives (which took some doing since I kept getting errors saying certain files just couldn't be deleted), and reseated the drives in their slots. Does this mean it's fine? Will I likely run into more problems in the future?

I'm definitely gonna warranty the one that's got problems already. When it comes to filling the drive up for testing, is there a program for that? Or something to get the drive to check every sector? I could just copy and paste a 60gb movie until it's full but that feels less thorough and more time consuming. Maybe something like a drive wiper that writes zero's to the whole drive?

they're currently intended to be a backup of my plex server so it's a backup of data I can afford to lose. But once I confirm they aren't basically DOA, I'm gonna swap them with the eight 4tb WD red live drives. So the two 16tb seagates will be live and the eight 4tb WD reds become the backup. If they fail after that i'll just remap the backup to live drive letter until I get it fixed. but if both drives fail I might just lose faith in recertified drives and buy new ones. I only mentioned the brand to be descriptive.

So trying to write the full 16tbs won't help show any errors? because this one seemed to only spot the faulty sectors once i had tried to write to them

Any suggestions on ways to test the other drive? I'm gonna be warrantying the one drive but if the other is faulty as well, i'd like to do them both in one go

I bought two recertified seagate 16TB drives from serverpartdeals and I this is what i'm seeing after a few days of use. So does this mean it's dead? I'm well within the warranty window on both drives but since I've got one doing this, I'm thinking I wanna test the other drive too. Is there a good program for testing drives?

I think there was a slight misunderstanding. The first test with XMP showed 23 errors The second test without XMP was 883 errors Then I did 2 tests with a known good stick to check the cpu and mobo Then the third test with the questionable RAM was also without XMP and is still running. I just included its current progress at the time of posting. Right now that test is at 6:37:26 and 2974 errors. So it seems to be getting more faulty the more I test it. It's not possible to run a memtest so wrong that you damage otherwise healthy ram right? The reason I'm being so thorough with this is because this faulty set is what they sent me to replace the last set of G skill ram that failed on me. So that's two sets of bad ram back to back. What are the chances? The only other thing I can think to try is to put the faulty ram in a different computer and run it but I feel like that would be a waste of time.

@Kilrah @BetteBalterZen @porina Thanks to all of you for taking the time to help me figure this out btw. A piece of information that might have been useful at the start that i forgot to mention is that only one of the sticks that was sent back for the RMA was showing errors in memtest. The other, with XMP on, tested by itself, showed zero errors for the whole test. So that might say that the XMP profile and bios version played nice with this model of RAM. The first test of the RMA RAM (both sticks), with XMP on, finished in 7:09:10 with 23 errors. (see attached memtest report #1 for more details) The second test with XMP off finished in 7:11:54 and had 883 errors. I'm wondering if the ram was damaged by a bad XMP profile that overvolted the chips or maybe it's just a coincidence that the second test saw more errors. (see attached memtest report #2 for more details) I ran a third and fourth test with a known good stick of ram in slot A1 then in B1. zero errors for either test. I think this means there isn't a hardware issue with the slots or CPU The motherboard model is ASRock B450M Pro4 and the bios version was 3.60 so I put the known good stick in and updated the bios to 5.3 (most recent non-beta version) which specifically says it improves memory compatibility. Then restarted the system and put in both RMA G. Skill sticks and started another memtest without XMP. It's currently at 231 errors at 33 minutes in. I might cancel this test since it's already failed and try each stick individually to see if only one is showing errors.

The fun thing about this is any change I make will take 8 hours of testing to see the results. I think XMP is on but I haven't tweaked any settings beyond that for sure. I ran memtest on a test stick of corsair ram for 8 hours while waiting for the RMA and saw zero errors so I would think that means the cpu isn't an issue. I was concerned there might be dust in the slot so I got some bright lights and a magnifying glass and really eyeballed it but it looked spotless. So I guess I'll try disabling XMP and run it again. Edit: It's running so I guess I'll post again when I wake up. I also saved the error report from the first one so if this one shows a pattern that might help narrow it down. Edit 2: it's already showing 2 errors 2 minutes in but I'm gonna let it finish in case it gives any helpful info.

I had some problems with a set of G skill ram so I ran memtest and saw 10,000 errors in 10 minutes. I RMA'd the set and just got the replacements in yesterday. They look like a new set in new packaging with no indication that they're refurbs but I figured I'd test them anyways. So I ran memtest for 7 hours on them and I see 22 errors. Everything I'm reading online is saying anything above zero means the RAM is bad. I'll RMA this set too if needed but I want to be 100% sure it's bad before telling them the second set is bad too. Is it possible it's seated wrong or some bios setting is causing some false positives?

I built a computer for a family member and they've been having weird BSODs. They said it would crash randomly every few hours with a different BSOD. My go-to solution was fresh install windows then I ran it for 24 hours straight without any crashes so they took it back to their home and within a day said it was crashing again. My theory is either bad hardware component or the wiring in their house is bad and causing power surges/dips. The only other oddity is they're a data hoarder with 10-20 external HDDs plugged in at all times, daisy chained on usb hubs but I wouldn't think that would cause this list of BSODs. I think this has been happening for over a year now too. I figured if it were a faulty hardware part the problem would most likely have progressed and eventually just fully break but it hasn't really changed in frequency. BSODs: MEMORY MANAGEMENT (most frequent by far) BAD POOL CALLER PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA FAULTY HARDWARE CORRUPTED PAGE PFN LIST CORRUPT KERNEL SECURITY CHECK FAILURE SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED (what failed: SRTSP64 SYS) SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED (what failed: Ntfs.sys) SECURITY CHECK FAILURE DPC WATCHDOG VIOLATION SYSTEM SERVICE EXCEPTION CRITICAL STRUCTURE CORRUPTION POOL CORRUPTION IN FILE AREA. ATTEMPTED WRITE TO READ ONLY MEMORY KERNEL DATA INPAGE ERROR STATUS ACCESS VIOLATION IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL And a few more that weren't documented Specs: Windows 10 x64 pro It's a 3 year old desktop which was built with all new parts CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 GPU: GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1650 (GV-N1650IXOC-4GD) PSU: EVGA 650 GQ, 80+ GOLD 650W (210-GQ-0650-V1) SSD: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 2TB mobo: ASRock (B450M PRO4) They want to build a different computer and leave the faulty one with me to try to fix, but until then I don't have enough access to it to get dump files or really troubleshoot. I'm just hoping someone can give me some ideas for something to test once I do get it