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Main hard drive in my PC died today suddenly

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40hz:
But I couldn't be that unlucky with SATA cables, could I?
-wraith808 (February 06, 2012, 04:49 PM)
--- End quote ---

Possibly. But there could also be an electrical issue with the SATA socket on either the drive or the motherboard. Sometimes when you remove or reinsert a cable something can get minor damage which often won't manifest until the system and the drive fully heat up.

If you get the same error again try: (1) switching the cable with a known good one (2) plugging the drive into a different SATA port on the mobo. (You may need to tell your CMOS setup which port to boot off if you do. Not all mobos can autodetect the port your bootable drive is on.)

If you're still seeing errors after that, replace the drive because you've eliminated the cable and the mobo as possibles, and all that's left is the drive itself.

Don't take chances with HDs. I get more than one repeating drive error, or a non-trivial SMART alert, I'll yank them. Especially since by the time SMART detects something you're already well into the danger zone. I've had SATAs catastrophically fail with *no* SMART warnings at all.

Luck. :Thmbsup:

tranglos:
I went through that experience less than a year ago, as chronicled here. I don't run real-time monitoring, because it does put additional strain on the system, and as my experience tells, you're likely to hear or otherwise feelthe drive failing before the software tells you:

My WD Raptor system drive died the other day after about 4 years of great performance. Lesson One: when the SMART warning kicks in, it is already too late! One moment I run the WD diagnostic tool and SMART checks out fine, a mere two hours later Windows tells me the drive has failed and needs to be replaced asap, data throughput speed drops to something like a 1.44" floppy, and you know it's going to die on you any minute.  Good thing I saw it coming hours before SMART did and made a fresh image just in time. Lesson Two: listen to your hard drive! :-)

Lesson Three: system image is a wonderful thing.

--- End quote ---

That's how it went. I noticed some operations were taking much more time than they should. After eliminating several possible causes, I realized the bottleneck was in writing data to the system drive. So I ran tests then, and they didn't detect a thing, but I knew something was very wrong. I had a recent drive image, so I backed up whatever else I could (there's no personal data on my system drive, which helps a lot), and even managed to create a full system image as well. Within two hours, the drive went into agony, and it was only then that Windows and SMART began screaming at me. Two hours too late, because at that point booting into Safe Mode took maybe 20 minutes and it was impossible to do the simplest tasks any more.

So a drive image of the system disc is a wonderful thing. Fifteen to thirty minutes and you're back in the saddle (not counting the time needed to go get a new drive). But monitoring and diagnostics utilities, not so good.

4wd:
SATA connectors have to be one of the worst designed connectors within a computer, IMO.

A fragile friction fit connector for a critical component that's subjected to temperature cycling and vibration - just who were these brilliant engineers?

Get some decent quality cables, (FWIW, I've never had a problem with the ones that come with Gigabyte motherboards), that have the metal latching tabs.

As Ath said, throw away the old ones.

superboyac:
eesh...yet another reminder to get my server project back into my todo list.  I have (so far) three 3TB drives sitting there, waiting to back up everything in multiply redundant fashion, as is typical of me. ;D

I love when I tell normal people that I have 12TB of hard drives...they almost get angry with me ;D, and their response is always along the lines of "Why do you need so much space?!"  :nono2: and I'm always left thinking "Why does this make you angry??"

wraith808:
Did you throw away the old SATA cables, and inserted new ones? That might be the only way to actually get rid of this problem.
Then use HDS Pro to reset the SMART counter.
-Ath (February 06, 2012, 04:56 PM)
--- End quote ---

I did that.  I had SATA cables from a completely different MB that I'd not had to use, and I replaced them with those.  I might actually purchase some separately to see if that helps, but I just wondered if anyone had any experience with this.

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