Multiple hard drive issues

[jdjacobs]

Hi guys. I'm trying to diagnose what's happening with my HDDs, and I'm kinda new at this, so if there's any information you need, just ask, and I'll give it to you, because I'm not sure what all is relevant in this case. So, first I noticed my computer was having these periods where it would freeze for a moment, and they increased in frequency until one night I was playing a game on it, and it happened multiple times during that session and I decided to restart it. When I did, it would start to load windows, then just go to a black screen. I hooked the hard drive up to two other machines and neither of them even registered that it was there.

So, I took my HDD from my older computer and put it in there in place of the corrupted one. It initially had Windows 7 on it, and I installed Windows 10 on it, like my previous hard drive had, and now from time to time I will get an error message saying "Windows has detected a hard disk problem" and it is very sluggish. I never had any issues with this drive in the past, so I became concerned that something is corrupting my hard drives.

So far, I replaced the SATA cables, and the PSU in the computer, and I ran partition guru, which informed me that I had over 1300 sectors that were bad. At this point, I am trying to figure out what else I can try. While searching this forum, I saw a similar issue and someone suggested updating the BIOS. I tried to go to my motherboard's site and do that, but I must have downloaded the wrong file, because it said my version of Windows couldn't run that file, so I haven't been able to do that yet. Any help however would be much appreciated.

Specs:
Motherboard: gigabyte ga-78lmt-usb3
RAM: Originally 8GB when the problem started, and I've since upgraded to 16GB
Both my corrupted hard drive and the one I'm currently using are Western Digital 500 GB. Not sure what other relevant information I should provide on them.

 

[Mark RM]

1300 bad sectors pretty Much says it all... the drive is bad.

 

[jdjacobs]

Yeah, it's a given that I will need to replace this drive as well, but I am hesitant to do so until I find out why two of my drives have started to fail me.

 

[Mark RM]

bad luck?, mathematically you could (unfortunately) end up with a dozen bad drives in a row, conversely you could get the longest lasting hard disk every built. It's really a crap shoot. The idea of backups and good images dating back a reasonable length of time isn't just for enterprise anymore.

I think buying good quality SSD's with a fairly measured life span has mitigated much of the risk of personal storage... I mean they even tell you how long they think they have to live.It's not perfect but it is better imo.

I'm sorry for your bad luck, but two failed drives isn't a reason to suspect other components.

 

[jdjacobs]

I guess, but I would rather be proactive about this and explore what could cause these issues than simply write it off as a coincidence just yet. I understand that two occurrences don't make a pattern, but I see no need to potentially waste a 3rd hard drive before I at least better understand what happened to the previous two.

 

[Mark RM]

Fairly spoken. I have a large amount of years in IT and I've investigated instances where hard disks were failing - number one was physical... machines were bumped, hit or over influenced by external vibration. Number two was poor AC power combined with poor DC power conversion (PSU). Number three was user error (improper installation, incorrect drive selection etc..)

Focus on those areas would be my honest advice.