On 14 Sep 98 at 22:15, Michael Tabak wrote: > I have been having intermittent hard drive problems (I/O errors; hangs; > etc.). Sometimes these occur during a session when everything had been > proceeding normally. Other times, they occur during bootup, when it sounds > as if either the hard drive is not starting up at all, or is having > difficulty staying operational. > > My computer case is from 1991, and this has occurred with 2 different hard > drives, both of which are less than 1 year old. > > 1. Can a faulty internal power supply cause this problem? It's possible. I recently discovered that one power wire to one of my drives had been almost severed, and I suspect that was contributing to the random reboots that had plagued the machine. > 2. If so, the internal power supply (from 1991) says it's 200 > Watts. Can I use a new case with a 250 Watts power supply? That should work. The wattage rating on the power supply is a maximum total for the devices you want to power. Three household lightbulbs (60W each) will run as well off a 250W supply as a 200W, but not very well off a 150W. Assuming that the problem is that your current arrangement is stretching the envelope on a 200W supply, moving to a 250W supply is likely to provide relief. [Since it takes a bit of extra energy to spin up a disk from a standing start, your "bootup" scenario definitely sounds like a power problem.] [A good power supply will run about twice what a cheap new case (including power supply) costs. Moving to a new case may not be the best thing to do.] I've sometimes experienced power problems that went away when I made sure that no set of drive power leads was supplying more than one hard drive. My gut feeling is that even if total capacity is sufficient, a single set of leads may not deliver enough "juice" to meet the spin-up needs of more than one drive. David G ----- **Need help with PCBUILD mailing list? Send an Email to:** Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> or Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>