By my experience with WD ATA drives- thought  some years ago,
it could be PSU. They like good power. Voltage barely out of limits
and they don't work. What is worse is that they don't like when there
is frequency component in voltage what is not possible detect with
MB sensors or multimeter. Maybe  it somewhat detectable with
multimeter it is not sure.  This appears when PSU is on its limits.
Voltage in question (5V could be perfect, but 12V could be poor)
or when PSU output capacitors start to give up.


Toomas


----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 1:14 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] SATA failure


> My new (2 months) Western Digital WD3200JD SATA drive is starting to fail. I
> don't know for sure if it is the drive or the SATA interface on my
> motherboard. The boot drive is an ATA drive and continues to work fine. The
> SATA is my data drive. After a boot, the SATA drive works fine, but then it
> may suddenly disappear! Disk manager shows no drive present. Device manger
> says that the SATA interface is working fine. Only a reboot will fix this
> situation.
>
> Another computer user I know in town just got a new computer for himself and
> installed a SATA drive. He had some lockup problems that he described to me.
> It sounded very much like the hard drive interface or hard drive was
> failing. He temporarily replaced the drive with his old ATA drive, and all
> lockup problems went away.
>
> My question to the list is to find out how prevalent SATA failure may be.
> Are the drives prone to failure, or is it the controller on the motherboard
> that is the culprit? I suspect the drive, but till I can run further
> analysis no conclusion can be made. Please share any feedback on SATA that
> you may have.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Peter
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