Intermittent hard drive problems
 

Hello there,

Recently, one of my hard drives (a 7-year old Western Digital SATA 160GB), it shuts off when I'm working on things and caused the partitions in the drive to be missing. I could hear the motor shutting off, and the HDD LED fully lit on. The frequency of the drive doing that increases from the past week. I restarted the PC, just to have the hard disk to come back again, but after a few minutes to a few hours later, it shuts off and gets missing again. :eek:

The SMART status on the HDD is fine, and I do not have power saving options on the HDDs as they are "always on".

I bought another new HDD just to standby if this thing is kaput. Luckily I moved all my work and thesis to another place when it happened.

Is this the HDD problem, or the motherboard?

The specs of the system is a Radeon 6670, Intel Core 2 Duo E7200, a couple of HDDs, and an Asus P5G41T-M motherboard, running with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Most likely the drive.
Have you run the manufacturer's diagnostic?

Hello,

I checked the diagnostic. Everything is fine, except that it likes to shut off the motors whenever it likes.

Check your power management settings.

I have already checked the power management settings, and the drives are all never shut off, as usual.

The drive's pretty old so it's a chance that it's going.

Assuming it's not the boot drive pull it.
If your computer goes back to behaving, nothing else shuts down at Random, then you have your answer.