Refering to the Western Digital Caviar Blue 250 Gb Ide Internal Hard Drive or any hard disk drive in general.
Can frequent dips in the power supply below the normal operating voltage cause hard disk drive failure?
Thanks.
Alan Chu
Hi a power supply that keeps dropping voltage can cause hard drives video card ram pretty much anything in your pc would be affected by it. If you keep using a bad power supply you stand the chance of it burning out any component in your pc. You can get a decent one for not much money there are sites on the net you can input your pc info and it will tell you what size of psu you need best to go 100 watts over what the system requires. A lot recommend corsair psu’s I am on there forums and they have enough problems and one RMA center for north America, and if you live in England and it goes you have to pay to ship it to the Netherlands. Best to buy from a company that has a RMA center near you. This is a link for a psu calculator. http://www.thermaltake.outervision.com/
Absolutely yes! Typically if there are power issues while a disk is conducting write operations you can get a bad sector. In many cases this can be fixed by “recertifying” the disk with the downloadable zeroing utility and diagnostics.
In the meantime, this one single improperly written sector can make the whole disk look bad. The disk itself becomes “preoccupied” with trying to fix it during the normal internal data lifeguard scan. It get’s busy playing with itself and doesn’t service requests from the system.
This sort of failure mode shows up as a frozen system, or as a disk that disconnects itself. Perhaps as an error reading from a specific file.
Where are we at on this?
