New 2 TB Hard Drives Fail

jat421

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Sep 20, 2010
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Hi,

I recently upgraded to a Asus P5N-D Motherboard & Ultra LSP750 750-Watt Power Supply Bundle.
And I bought three 2 TB drives to make a RAID 5. I have 5 GB of RAM in it. So I plugged in 3 drives to the RAID card 3ware 9500S-12 and booted up the computer it only recognized 1 drive. Right when I booted up I smelled that something has burnt. I though the 2 drives were probably bad so I sent them back and got two new 2TB WD drives. Right when I plugged those in I smelled something again and the RAID card didn't recognize the drives.

Something is burning out the drives when I plug them in. Could it be the RAID card or the power supply?. But one 2 TB of the RAID card and one 320 GB of the motherboard are working fine. I can't figure out where the problem is?. Any help is appericated!!!

Edit: They won't even turn on after the smell and the smoke.
 
It's hard to imagine a problem, but if there is one then based on the symptoms you're describing I'd suspect the power supply first.

Normal hard drives will work in RAID, it's just that they're more likely to be flagged as being "failed" if they happen to be doing error recovery while the RAID controller is waiting for them. That wouldn't affect your ability to see and configure the drive at the BIOS level.
 
Your PSU appears to be overvolting your drives. Current HDD models have TVS (transient voltage suppression) diodes on each of the +5V and +12V inputs. These will sacrifice themselves by going short circuit in order to protect the rest of the electronics.

You can replace the 12V diode with an SMBJ12A, and the 5V diode with an SMAJ5.0A. Both are available from Farnell, Mouser, Digikey.

These URLs should help you identify the components:

http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_ICs.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diodes.txt