Can motherboards kill a hard drive?

[Eran English Guy]

So I recently bought myself an Asus M5A97 R2 motherboard and transferred all my existing hardware to it and reinstalled windows on my 64 GB SSD. One of my backup drives, a 500GB Seagate Barracuda decided to die on me a few days ago. I was transferring some mp3's to it and it just failed to transfer, then it disappeared from my computer! I went into the BIOS and I still couldn't find it. I unplugged it and replugged it, then it worked again, but only barely. It could access files from that drive but after copying a few MP3's over it would freeze up on me. I succeeded in doing a quick format on it but when I tried to do a proper format, the computer would wait for a while and eventually tell me that windows explorer had crashed. I tried using different power ports and SATA ports, no change.

I'm wondering why this drive died on me. Could a new motherboard do that?

Also, now and again when I'm accessing something from one of my 5 hard drives, the computer will freeze up for a few seconds (even when accessing something like an MP3) until the drive has powered up. This would never happen with my old mother board.

The strangest thing is sometimes it will freeze up while web surfing or something. What on earth could be causing this?

I'm using windows 7 64. I have 4GB of ram. This setup worked fine with my older motherboard which was a AMD Asrock mini motherboard.

 

[Tradesman1]

Do you have the latest BIOS and mobo drivers

 

[Eran English Guy]

not sure, how would I look into this

 

[Css Xperts]

Not sure dear, according to my knowledge Motherboards can't do so, if you have some confusion about this then go for an experienced person.

 

[Eran English Guy]

Okay I was watching a movie off one of my external drives and the computer completely froze up on me. This is the 2nd time in 3 days this sort of thing has happened. I had to forcibly restart it. What the hell?

 

[davefowler]

Nothing wrong with the drives. The motherboard is faulty. These are some of the Newegg negative reviews for it-

" Windows 8 would randomly freeze."
" For some reason, it messed with my hard drives."
"If you can get it to post it will freeze randomly some time not more than 20 minutes later."
" freezes on and off when booting from a dvd or usb drive....have never gotten it to boot from a hard drive always freezes."
"Random shutdowns and freezing in Windows. Froze while in BIOS once."
"randomly restarts, crashes, and freezes continuously, and without errors."

 

[Eran English Guy]

So what do I do? I read that it could be a loose connection or something, like one of the plugs are not put in right or something. I know that when I go to the Bios it doesn't show the speed of one of the 3 fans for some reason (the other 2 it shows the RPM). Beyond that, everything seems to be in order.

I read it might have to do with the voltage going the the ram but how would I know what I'm supposed to change it to? My PSU was fine before I changed the motherboard so I doubt it's that.

Nothing wrong with the drives. The motherboard is faulty. These are some of the Newegg negative reviews for it-

" Windows 8 would randomly freeze."
" For some reason, it messed with my hard drives."
"If you can get it to post it will freeze randomly some time not more than 20 minutes later."
" freezes on and off when booting from a dvd or usb drive....have never gotten it to boot from a hard drive always freezes."
"Random shutdowns and freezing in Windows. Froze while in BIOS once."
"randomly restarts, crashes, and freezes continuously, and without errors."

 

[Eran English Guy]

I'm posting more about my motherboard problems here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1806332/asus-m5a97-randomly-crashing.html

 

[davefowler]

No don't mess with voltages. See if you can RMA the motherboard and get it repaired or exchanged.

 

[Eran English Guy]

No don't mess with voltages. See if you can RMA the motherboard and get it repaired or exchanged.

There is no option to repair or exchange it. I left the country where I bought it.

So, what can be done otherwise?

 

[Eran English Guy]

I've tried swapping the ram around, lets see if that makes any changes. I might want to add that the only times it's actually crashed on me was when I was watching a movie WHILE downloading a torrent.