Somewhere near the end of the year last a drive imploded this was definitely a drive failure, but then a second drive started to stop responding and show errors all while still being “healthy” in the SMART data. Before it got too far we (it is my brothers PC) unplugged the drive and left it there just in case, it was not dead yet but did not want to push it.
We added a new drive to replace the dead one and all was well for a time but then it too started to not respond, and disappear from the explorer. Just on a whim I changed the Sata port and it was fine again.
Then just an hour ago the drive was not accessible again, some restarts and it stopped showing up. Unplugged and replugged it into the same port it was in and it worked again fine.
Now I am thinking it is might be the motherboard or cables but have no clue where to start. I am also wondering if either of these could kill a drive if left unattended, from just flaky to dead?
These are all spinning rust, his SSD has been fine. I recall a topic here warning of the As media sata controller in an AMD motherboard being odd and dropping drives. I have no idea where to start with this, but probably going to try get new sata cables and replace them first. The system.was stable for more than a year before this happened, once the first drive died (noise and catastrophic failure) then everything went downhill.
The motherboard is an MSi B350 tomahawk with a 1600x for the CPU.
Please help. These are the worst kind of problems, the unknowns.
Firstly I’d try different cables as you have said.
It is possible there could be an issue with the motherboard. Do the drives work fine in another system? Try to eliminate as many variables as possible.
I have seen failing SATA controllers exhibit such behavior. Only once though and it was on an old Athlon II system…
Could potentially be the power supply too. Though you’d probably start seeing instability across the board if that were the case
Gonna get new ones tomorrow and see but it is all a waiting game which sucks.
I have not taken the drives out yet as I don’t have a lot if free time and coordinating with him is hard sometimes. But will give it a go when I get the time. The power supply is pretty new, was upgraded with the rest of the PC when Ryzen went in and there are no other faults to report like you said.
I’m hoping on the power supply train, too. I have seen drive controllers go tits up, but power supplies have been the issue more frequently. Controllers tend to work reliably, until they just don’t work at all. Power supplies cause the sometimes-works-sometimes-doesn’t gremlins.
Some drives also have wonky energy-saving features. Try disabling them if you can.
If you have a board that is consistently dropping drives and drives work when plugging in to a different port is highly suspicious and I highly doubt that its the drives.
testing the drives in a different machine can rule out whether the drives are at fault.
but I suspect that this board may have been infected with a bios virus or may have been subject to a surge!
while psu do filter and condition power to the board they are not perfect, many spikes occur so rapidly that the clamping circuitry cannot respond quick enough to prevent damage.
this is one specific reason i recommend isolation transformer systems!
new power supplies must pass rigorous testing in order to be approved and you will rarely find one faulty unless it has been subject to a large surge( If it has the evidence is detectable by the burnt smell.
as posted the original drive had a catastrophic failure! and now the newer drives are dropping out! the mainboard sata controller may have been damaged to the point of unreliability.
These are infrequent at best it was weeks since the last time it happened and as far as I know has not come back yet, but it has only been a day. Money is not plentyful, I would probably have to buy the parts for his PC which is a nice gesture but I am not exactly keen in buying parts that I don’t know are bad or not.
It is even more annoying that it is not my PC. At this point he is done with PCs and their shit, basically just wants a PS4. Which I can see but I cannot deal with that mental tax. I know the shortcomings and know I will never hear the end of it. He us pissed that the PC is acting up, I would be too, but I know how he uses it and will be even more annoyed with a console, not the mention the library of games he has and won’t have access to after, as the ps4 would require him selling the PC which I know he won’t get the money for and will regret.
So I am stuck being the tech for a problem I can’t diagnose or fix potentially.