Can a motherboard eat hard drives?

[dtw]

So last month, my main system hard drive started throwing codes. No biggie, I don't think I'd ever had a hard drive failure in 20 years, so it was overdue. All around the same time I installed a new video card and power supply to feed it, and rotated another drive to be the boot/Windows drive. About a month later and it is throwing codes much worse than the last one. A few failures to spin up, and a few thousand bad sectors.

The PC is on a power conditioner/surge protector, but not an UPS. Did 'lightning' strike twice, or is there possibly an issue with my PC/motherboard frying my main drive? I am ruling out the power supply as that was swapped out around the same time as the drive.

[Scott R]

Well sometimes we have servers that have been running for a decade non-stop, they get turned off for one reason or another and sometimes the don't come back. Simple act of spinning everything down, letting it cool, or changing power conditions kills it.

It's a long shot but I suppose the new PS could have done it.

[stomachmonkey]

Was the drive you swapped in new? Sounds like you rotated an old/used drive?

To answer your question, possibly.

Could be a bad IDE/SATA cable.

Is the PC dusty? Getting proper ventilation? Not overheating?

When you say "throwing codes" are we talking read/write errors, bad sectors?

Are the drives physically functional? Can you format and use without errors?

[dtw]

SM, the PC is clean. I keep a can of air handy and hose it out now and then. Temps are good - it is a bit of a hot-rod gaming machine, so I've got the case crammed with fans and the CPU runs a liquid cooler. Yes, the new Windows drive is a 1 or 2 year old 1.5TB Barracuda I had in there before. The errors are damaged sectors (2,630), spin up failure (1), unstable sectors (125).

Now that I poll the other drives, I see a couple UDMA communication errors, but nothing else amiss. The main drive is still physically functional - typing this post on the faulty machine. I have lost a couple files though.

The old drive was still functioning as well, but I took a sledgehammer to it after I retired it.

[island_dude]

It is funny you mention this. I found a board by asus that did exactly that. I had four identical systems that shared the same pathology of killing hard drives. I have no idea why. We found that if we used a raid card the same drives would perform with no problems. All of the drives on the motherboard controller were very short lived. Fortunately, the drives it killed were often still warranted. We tried several different drive vendors to see if we got a bad lot of drives. Crazy.

Before I had this experience, I would have told you that this was crazy to even consider.

[red-beard]

I recently was having problems with a new machine and a SSD. After playing around a bit, I tried a new cable. No problems since.

[id10t]

on board controller could be bad

[azasadny]

Yep, onboard controller or cable are the likely culprits

[dtw]

Thank you. How can I test for either, without sacrificing more drives?