Odd Storage Drive Failures

electro_neanderthal · August 8, 2021

Alright, I'm in a bit of a bind here, and don't know what's going on. My brother just had an issue with his SSD corrupting, so I tried to help him fix it, ultimately resorting to deleting all partitions and reformatting the drive in Linux Manjaro (through USB using an adapter Seagate created for its older portable HDDs... it's a wonderful piece of hardware).

That succeeds, but with 4 or 5 end of file errors on a corrupted table. So we suspect the SSD, despite being readable and writable in Linux, is messed up.

Then his HDD gets corrupted. Windows, again, not reading it and giving off the same corruption warning.

So, here's my 2 hypotheses:

Either the motherboard (only a year old) is messed up or Windows messed it up.

The latter hypothesis also exists because a few days earlier, a few days after updating to the latest Windows 10, my 390X stopped producing a signal, the motherboard (Z87) even failing to detect it. It would, however, detect a less power hungry card... then there was an issue with the ethernet breaking, installing a working driver manually not being able to fix it.

My brother's PC detected the 390X in BIOS, so the card worked, but... this week has been a tech nightmare. The PSU I was using is 7 years old, it had a 5 year warranty (Corsair HX 750), and was sending full power into the card (through all the 8 pin connectors) without the PC even being on, so that's being replaced (and so is the motherboard, and all associated necessary upgrades) as I type this. But, I digress.

I have a hard time believing 2 different types of storage drive, bought at two different times, fail in pretty much the same way, at the same time.

My brother's PC is only a year old, and has a Cougar 1200 watt PSU that's maybe 2 years old, and it doesn't have an issue with anything else.

I'm fairly certain new storage drives will be bought regardless, but I really want to know if anyone can shine a light on what might have happened. Was this probably just a series of unfortunate and unlikely events? Using a web search only brings up irrelevant information, which is why I'm here asking this.