Possible voltage malfuntion in Hard Drives

[wothan]

Hi there!

I'm treading in the high realm of speculation here, but... could be a voltage malfunction be the cause of my hard drive failures?

My issue goes as this: I have an Asus GL702VM. From the beggining it started to click (not regularly, but now and then) in the HDD. I was like full of work back then and I couldn't leave it in the warranty service for 2 weeks, so I continue working with it doing regular backups. That was more than 1 year ago. I tried manually replacing the HDD one time, but, call it bad luck (or something else), the new HDD I replaced it with also clicked. So I returned it and continued working with the original. That was when I started to suspect that maybe the problem wasn't the HDD, but maybe the motherboard or the voltage distribution were doing weird things. (The SMART tests were always OK with that drive)

Now, a year later, at start, windows warns me about a bad health SMART error... with the smaller M.2 SSD, a 128GB Samsung. I'm backing it up and thinking about the options... because I can replace it, of course, but I fear maybe is something other than the SSD itself. I suppose that a year-old M.2 failing is not something very very common.

Could be a voltage issue, afecting the hard drives? Or that's unlikely?
There's anyway of checking if the voltage it is receiving is the proper one? How?

Any other ideas about what can the problem be?
Then again, it can be bad luck; that's not uncommon.

Thank you all!

 

[Rogue Leader]

An occasional light click from a hard drive isn't necessarily that the drive is going bad. Lot of moving parts in there, it happens. As for a "voltage malfunction" if there was too little voltage you would notice a performance issue (if it even ran) if there was too much it would have failed quite a bit sooner than a year.

HWMonitor can tell you (with most systems) the voltage values within the system if the power supply of the system is running properly. Now since its a laptop theres nothing you can do to fix it, you'll need to warranty it. As for checking the voltage to particular components, without a very precise multimeter and a desire to dismantle the system and a knowledge of the pinouts you're never going to be able to do that.

 

[wothan]

An occasional light click from a hard drive isn't necessarily that the drive is going bad. Lot of moving parts in there, it happens. As for a "voltage malfunction" if there was too little voltage you would notice a performance issue (if it even ran) if there was too much it would have failed quite a bit sooner than a year.

HWMonitor can tell you (with most systems) the voltage values within the system if the power supply of the system is running properly. Now since its a laptop theres nothing you can do to fix it, you'll need to warranty it. As for checking the voltage to particular components, without a very precise multimeter and a desire to dismantle the system and a knowledge of the pinouts you're never going to be able to do that.

Yeiks!

Sorry, I have a horrible month and I couldnt drop by to answer your answer...
Thank you very much!
It has been very informative. The click in the HD is... like in the limbo, in terms of frequency and intensity. Its just notable enough to draw my attention as something I've never heard before in a healthy HD without being a big, red loud warning sign, and it's been a year and some time and it never gave me a single problem. I'll keep backuping and with an eye on it.
And thank you for the information about the voltage, it's been very instructive.

IN the end I've replaced the bad SSD and all seems to run smoothly.

Thank you again!
Cheers