[MaYDeY]

Just a quick question, can two hard drives fail at the same time for no apparent reason?. Some message came up didn't really read it. After a while I went into My Computer and noticed two out of five drives were missing. I restarted and nothing, went into bios, the system registers the drives but no luck booting them. They both SATA interfaced, both 320 Gigs, and both just under a year old. It doesn't really matter one was a continues back-up drive and the other had some movies on it.

[Jd123]

Its probley a psu error running 5 hard drives is alot for most power sources

Go into the bios and look for power management or system status, something like that. Most boards have this these days. It will show you voltages, temp and fan speeds. All very important things. Check your hard drives look for the voltage on them if the power is 2 low or 2 high it will cause errors. Tempature is important espeically when your running 5 drives

[Homey]

If they're showing up in the bios and not in windows that's quite odd, likely windows is having some issues with them. It is possible for two to die at the same time, if the PSU takes them both out. Generally though most power supplies can handle multiple drives as they don't consume much power, especially at idle. Have you gone to disk management under Administrative tools in the control panel? If they're showing up there they might need to be re-added or formatted.

[Helios]

An alternative way to diagnose whether the HDD has failed or not is to load up a second OS from a CD/USB.

See if it finds the hard drives. If not, it may indeed be a hardware problem.

[BLuel4bel]

5 HDD's? That's alot. What kind of PSU do you have? Also, have you tried re-connecting the SATA cables?

[MaYDeY]

My PSU is rated at 1000 watts, when I was buying my PC I'd made sure I had enough power for future updates, didn't think about electric bill at that time tho As for hard drives, they are ok. I took them to my tech support at work. Probably windows is going down, since one of my sound cards also uninstalled itself. My guess is format coming soon.

[bears5150]

hard drive failure is a sucky thing... still revovering from my raid 0 fiasco.

[Homey]

Don't worry about your power bill. A 1000W PSU consumes no more than a 750W PSU with the same load. So if all your components need 300W, both are going to use that, give or take based on efficient at certain load.

[MaYDeY]

Homey, on 28 July 2010 - 02:46 PM, said:

Don't worry about your power bill. A 1000W PSU consumes no more than a 750W PSU with the same load. So if all your components need 300W, both are going to use that, give or take based on efficient at certain load.

LOL first month after I got my PC my electrical bill went up by $30.

[Homey]

MaYDeY, on 28 July 2010 - 07:07 PM, said:

LOL first month after I got my PC my electrical bill went up by $30.

My computer is quite a power hog and it only consumes about 250W idle and 400 load. New computers tend to use a bit more power. Hopefully you got a quality PSU that has efficiency 85% or higher.

[MaYDeY]

Homey, on 29 July 2010 - 08:40 AM, said:

My computer is quite a power hog and it only consumes about 250W idle and 400 load. New computers tend to use a bit more power. Hopefully you got a quality PSU that has efficiency 85% or higher.

Well, my computer is a power hog as well, the only reason I mentioned electric bill was because my old PC was
power shit (in every possible way).

[Homey]

Oh I know, it's crazy what they use now, it's mostly the video card too. At one point I was running 3 8800 ultras. The power consumption meter I had showed about 700W. So much heat from that thing too.

[Helios]

My ATI 5670 is surprisingly nice on the PSU. (I upgraded, SO worth $80)

[Homey]

yeah the 5670 is ftw for value. I had a 4670 in my htpc, same deal.