Harddrive failure

What causes a hard drive to fail?

Age - hard drives just grow old and die.

Power failures and power spikes. Most of the time, your hard drive survives these power problems, other times they don't.

Viruses can make your hard drive unreadable, or they can corrupt the data so it is unusable.

Physical damage. If you drop a hard drive (or the computer it is installed in) you can render the hard drive inoperable. Sometimes just sliding the system across the desk while the system is on can cause severe hard drive problems.

Defects in the hard drive - as with anything, hardware failures happen.

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If you have different drives fail in the same machine, I would surmise that the reason would be a power spike issue or a virus that resides in the BIOS.

Maxwell

have you changed the power supply??
It sounds like you may have a problem with a higher voltage than is recommended for the drive and it may be burning it out.

Hi,

And to add another possibility to Maxwell's answer... there could be a problem with your motherboard.

Try turning the system completely off (ie. At the wall) and letting it cool right down (for an hour or more) before switching it on again. Its just possible that your BIOS will see it again.

How about trying another controller? Does that make any difference? Another cable? If you have access to one...

Also try the other power cable. There are generally at least two power cables coming from the power supply supplying the drives.

The other thing to do is to put the hard drive into the other computer to see if that PC can see the drive either.

You really need to narrow down these things to a particular component giving you troubles.

I guess its possible that a faulty motherboard will be actually blowing up the drives so I wouldn't put any more in there until you've established just how dead they are!

You could just be the most unlucky person in the world rightnow. Hardrive wise, that is... But if you've really blown three of them then my bet is on your motherboard also being stuffed.

Cheers,
Tim.

I agree with everyone else that has responded.

If your power supply is bad, the motherboard may be damaged.

The combination of a bad power supply, and damage to the motherboard could easily destroy the electronics on the drive.

You can takea voltmeter, and connect it to the 4 wire drive power jack.
Both black wires are ground.
The red wire should be 5 Volts,
The yellow 12.

I would also check the voltages at the motherboard power connector, and if you can identify them, the on-board voltage regulators.

If the main 5 volt supply is higher than 5.5 volts, I would seriously consider scrapping the entire system.
All of the hardware has been subjected to higher than normal voltage for an extended period of time.

Chas