HDDs Disappearing

[Xplorer4x4]

I have 2 HDDs that keep disappearing on me out of the blue. I don't have the exact dmesg error but it is something about the disk being frozen. However, the last time the drive disappeared on me, I couldn't find an error in demsg.The drive will reappear after a reboot. I have run tests on the HDDs, and they seem alright SMART wise. They are both less then 3 months old. I have a suspicion that it could be the PSU rather then the HDDs itself as I recently added a PCI Add on card with 2 SATA ports.I can not recall if the problem existed prior to putting in the card itself, but the HDDs in question are running to the SATA ports on the mobo which brings me to suspicion number 2. Could the on board SATA ports or controller be dieing?

[oshunluvr]

Also, I have had bad SATA cables. They can cause odd things like this. PSU is a good bet though.

Maybe the PCI card is conflicting? Have you tried pulling it and running the two suspect drives without the card in?

[oshunluvr]

I see you have Windows on this machine, too. Does the problem occur there?

[tek_heretik]

You could be right about a lot of things, bad cables, hmm, if they are suspect, replace them. Do you overclock? Your PSU does seem kind of a low wattage for all your hardware (that video cards sucks a lot of juice), I am betting you have a gazillion cooling fans running too. As for MSI, had one ONCE years ago, never again, not so great quality, I use and only trust Gigabyte boards. Do you have a friend you can try the suspect drives in their system? Plug one drive at a time in to a known good port and boot with a live DVD or USB drive, see what happens.

Edit: Trouble shooting is basically a process of elimination, starting with the least amount of hardware attached to the board and gradually add as you go along, every card, etc, you add adds load to the PSU, not saying that is your problem, just suggestions. It sounds like you pretty much figured out what is going on on your own.

[Xplorer4x4]

Glad you guys mentioned cables. I forgot to mention I have tried replacing the cable with both a new old one(one from when I got the mobo but did not use), and a brand new cable.

I have not spent any time in windows since the issue started. I spent as little time as I can in Windows. Not that I hate it, I actually am in the minority who find Win 8 to be a great improvement over Win 7, but thats another issue for another thread.

As for MSI, I agree. I will not buy MSI mobos for the foreseeable future. I had 1 or 2 before this, and I found them to be quality mobos, but there QC has seriously slipped in the last year or two. I got this mobo in January, and had to RMA two or three before getting an RMA that worked. Now don't get me wrong, every manufacturer will have some DOAs. Weather it be shipping from the factory to the distributor, or distributor to the customer, but two or three in a row? Don;t even get me started on Newegg customer service. Newegg used to be great but they dropped the ball on each of the RMAs. The final mobo they claimed to send it "overnight." Well they did...they sent it the cheap economy version of overnight that:
1. Does not deliver on Saturdays.
2. Only promise next day delivery if shipped before 1(?)PM the day before. It was after 1PM so even if they sent it on a weekday it would have still have taken 2 days to deliver it.
3. The RMA before that was sent two day shipping, so this form of over night was no better then 2 day shipping in this case.
4. There was no communication between departments.
5. I forgot, but it was just a bad experience over all. I don;t plan to buy from them any time soon unless it is just too god of a deal to pass up and even then I can't say if I would be that desperate to save money.

Ok getting off track, but yeah I guess theres no way to get around removing the card. I was just hopping to be able to bypass the testing phase as it is so convient having access to all my drives again and not having to hot swap!

Sadly I am probably out of luck when it comes to borrowing parts from any one.

[tek_heretik]

Who said hot swap? I meant disconnect almost everything (except what is necessary) except one drive of the drives you are having trouble with, have a live DVD or USB drive ready for boot up from a COLD boot. Repeat with a single different drive attached. I am talking step by step process of elimination here. You should have seen when I thought my memory went bad, TWO DAYS of trying different settings and diagnostics, lol, it turns out that boards that claim they can run memory faster than what Intel states in their CPU spec sheet will eventually start to 'puke', the solution was to scale back the memory speed to the what the CPU supports 'natively'. The testing was worth it, can't afford to run out an buy new parts all the time at the drop of a hat.

[dibl]

I wonder whether there could be an IRQ or memory conflict between the onboard controller and the PCI add-on controller? The way to find out would be to pull the add-on controller and run the remaining two drives for awhile on the onboard controller.

[oshunluvr]

I wonder whether there could be an IRQ or memory conflict between the onboard controller and the PCI add-on controller? The way to find out would be to pull the add-on controller and run the remaining two drives for awhile on the onboard controller.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was thinking when I suggested pulling the card.

www.newegg.com has a power calculator if you want to see how close you are to (or over) your limit. I was over-stressing my old PSU so that every time it got warm my computer would freeze. Turned out the increase in ambient air temp. caused a reduction in PSU efficiency and then was leaving me 30 watts too low to support my 'puter. An upgrade solved the problem.

[tek_heretik]

Yeah, that's kinda what I was thinking when I suggested pulling the card.

www.newegg.com has a power calculator if you want to see how close you are to (or over) your limit. I was over-stressing my old PSU so that every time it got warm my computer would freeze. Turned out the increase in ambient air temp. caused a reduction in PSU efficiency and then was leaving me 30 watts too low to support my 'puter. An upgrade solved the problem.

I tend to allow for plenty of 'overhead' with most hardware purchases, for example if a base machine I build requires a 400W power supply, I will get a 600 or 700W. There is no predicting what will be added later (like a gazillion USB devices for example) and power supplies lose a bit of guts over time due to wear and tear, that has to be compensated for too.

[Xplorer4x4]

Who said hot swap?

I did, because if I do not use the card I have more drives then SATA ports. I realize exactly what you were saying, I was simply stating it is going to suck if I need to revert to hot swapping.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was thinking when I suggested pulling the card.

www.newegg.com has a power calculator if you want to see how close you are to (or over) your limit. I was over-stressing my old PSU so that every time it got warm my computer would freeze. Turned out the increase in ambient air temp. caused a reduction in PSU efficiency and then was leaving me 30 watts too low to support my 'puter. An upgrade solved the problem.

I wasn't able to find the PSU Calculator from neweegg. Interesting details about the ambient temperatures. PSU wise, I suspect it is getting close to it's max. Here are the things not mentioned in my sig:
6 fans, 2 of which have LEDs(given the low power nature of LEDs I don;t think that matter much).
1 DVD Burner
1 x Intel x25M G2 SSD

The only difference between now and before the card, is the card, obviously, and I decided to reuse my x25M which I had planed to sell, and dedicate that to my vmware drives. Everything else already had power 24/7.

I suppose this would be a good time to bring up the problems I have when putting a heavy work load on my rig. Say I try to extract a bunch of files at once, the entire system starts lagging even though the files are on one of the DATA drives, not my Intel 320SSD boot drive. Also, after vmware workstation runs for a long time, it to starts to cause the entire system to start to lag to the point of being unusable and eventually freeze up if I don't beat it to the punch and reboot! Wondering if the PSU is unable to handle the load..

[oshunluvr]

http://images10.newegg.com/BizIntell...alc/index.html

[Xplorer4x4]

I could not accurately portray my rig. I decided to count my black/7200rpm drive as a green drive since I want a fairly accurate representation of the current demands of my system:

1. Upgrade the PSU - I was thinking maybe this one, but I can't decide if I feel bronze certified is good enough, or if I want to go Gold. Platinum seems over kill though.
2. Upgrade the GPU.- If I upgrade to a AMD 7770, I am going to be getting as much performance as I have now, give or take a bit. However, the reduction in nm on the chip and so forth draws about half the power I believe.

Both are roughly the same price.

[oshunluvr]

Re. the rating: It's really about money. If you can afford and desire the higher rating, buy it. If initial cost concerns you more than long term electrical usage, buy the bronze unit. Corsair is a generally good brand and the reviews are good.

IMO, efficiency is a bigger factor when you're approaching the limit of the PSU. Upgrading from 520 to 750 you'll be well within the PSU limits. In my case, I had a 700 but was asking for 720 from it. It worked fine on cold days, but when it got hot out (lower efficiency) it shut down. My OCZ Gold rated 1000 watter runs nice and solid!

[tek_heretik]

Try this calculator, and put exactly what you have, 7200rpm drives, SSDs, there is even a section to select exactly what size fans you have and if they have LEDs or not, even add on cards like the one with your new HDD ports, etc, etc.

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Please post the results, I am curious.

Btw, if you pay for your own electricity, get a Gold or Platinum PSU (the higher the 'rating' the more efficient the PSU is at converting outlet voltage to the PSU's various voltage rails, especially under load), if you are in an apartment for example where the electricity is included in the rent, then it won't matter. Generally I find the higher models have better components on the circuit board(s) inside and will probably last longer. I have been using the same high-end Enermax PSU for 7 years now without so much as a burp.

[Xplorer4x4]

IMO, efficiency is a bigger factor when you're approaching the limit of the PSU. Upgrading from 520 to 750 you'll be well within the PSU limits.

Yes, I am a bit rusty on picking out PSUs(thankfully the link tek posted reminded me to check the rails-not just wattage), but I know efficiency is more important when you start pushing the limits of the PSU. The 7770 will decrease my wattage draw by roughly 50 watts, but then again my PSU just had it's 4th birthday in December. This is the third chipset upgrade it has held me over through.

My OCZ Gold rated 1000 watter runs nice and solid!

100 watter? I thought electricity and water don't mix? On a more serious note, I will never be caught dead with OCZ, but glad to hear it suited you well.

Try this calculator, and put exactly what you have, 7200rpm drives, SSDs, there is even a section to select exactly what size fans you have and if they have LEDs or not, even add on cards like the one with your new HDD ports, etc, etc.

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Please post the results, I am curious.

Btw, if you pay for your own electricity, get a Gold or Platinum PSU (the higher the 'rating' the more efficient the PSU is at converting outlet voltage to the PSU's various voltage rails, especially under load), if you are in an apartment for example where the electricity is included in the rent, then it won't matter. Generally I find the higher models have better components on the circuit board(s) inside and will probably last longer. I have been using the same high-end Enermax PSU for 7 years now without so much as a burp.

http://i.imgur.com/WwhJkYD.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/nQDSrUH.jpg
I posted the screen shots just in case you can catch something I missed that has been covered here, but I think I got it all. I should probably check it tomorrow if my chronic pain subsides to normal levels and I get a good night sleep.

As for electricity, I dunno what kind of apartments you are talking about, but around here I don't know of any place that pays your electricity. The good news is we went from a 450 sq foot apartment to a 2 bedroom town house apartment that has twice that much space per floor and yet our electricity is the same as the tiny one bedroom apartment.

I stand by Corsair over a recent mishap. I had to get down and dirty splicing wires to repair a a fan. I some how got the polarity backwards and when I turned on the computer, the entire cable turned bright white, started to melt and my PSU puffed out a nice cloud of smoke. She seems to still be going strong though! If she survived that, I have to stand behind Corsair. Other then that, it's been rock solid. Not saying anything else is bad, but I just have to stand behind Corsair on this.