Suspicious HDDs Faulures

LlamaMonster · May 10, 2020

Hello, everyone. Last month 3 Hard Drives have in some way failed on me with a 4th one ready to join them. The drives experience clicking and sometimes initialization failures. The strange part is that outside my PC they're perfectly fine. No issues whatsoever. My SSDs aren't affected at all.

The first Hard Drive is from my PS3 (internal) and it completely refuses to let my BIOS to boot. Worrying and loud clicking coming out of it. When plugged in to the PS3? Completely normal non-clicking behavior.

The second drive is from my Laptop. When plugged in I sometimes have to physically move It in order to boot with it. Absolutely no issues when plugged in to the laptop.

My third Hard Drive is my older Desktop drive. It was sitting in my drawer when one day I needed it to backup my data temporarily. I knew this drive was completely healthy but still it also got somehow broken with clicking. Whenever those clicks happen the drive will hang for a second before continuing to read like nothing happened. This sometimes causes Input/Output errors on linux.

My fourth and final drive is currently my main barracuda drive for storing games and such. Recently it also started clicking and whenever those clicks happen the drive will disconnect and reconnect even though its connected trough SATA. I'm not sure if there is any special data corruption. There are some that i believe came from using WinBTRFS but no other.

I tried Memtest but it came out clean. Trying different cables yielded nothing and I tried testing my fourth drive but it disconnects midway trough the test. My drives are:
Second one: Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500GB
Third one: Seagate Barracuda LP 1.5TB

Fourth one: Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM008 2TB
(Just now realizing that all are seagate drives)

My mobo is Asus rampage II extreme with a CoolerMaster Elite V3 600W

Not sure if that's enough info but hope it somehow it gets resolved. Everything happened recently which is what I find suspicious and very nerving.

The_russian · May 10, 2020

This could be a problem with the power supply either giving dirty power or not enough voltage. I have had a similar experience with a hard drive, but I was using an external dock with an external power brick. If I used the dock the drive would click and have a slight grinding noise. When I plugged it in internally to the computer the noise stopped. The power supply you have is listed under "Tier E -Potentially dangerous in multiple scenarios" in the tier list which doesn't give much hope for it. My recommendation would be to replace the power supply, before it decides to take out anything else.