Fans killed hard drive.

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Hi And thanks for reading this post.

I recently had the bright idea to place fans above my hard drives in order to blow air onto them and keep them cool.

Now the drives have stopped working

I'm trying to figure out why this is.

I cracked open the fans and found magnets inside, could these magnets have had an effect on the magnetic dics within the hard drives and ruined them.

What should i do? format the hard drives and start again? or do you think the magnets may have caused permanent damage?

Difficult to tell, the hard drives are wd caviar black 3tb and 2tb, purchased them brand new, only a month old.

Many thanks. John.
 
Now the drives have stopped working
...
What should i do? format the hard drives and start again? or do you think the magnets may have caused permanent damage?

What does exactly "stopped working" mean?

I also very much doubt the fans' magnetic field has been the culprit. Most likely power supply noise, just like richie00boy says.

Plus - modern large-capacity HDDs are not exactly reliable, even if new. Did you check their SMART status? Any SATA errors?

If there are any errors in SMART, you should be able to claim warranty and have them replaced. Pretty common these days...
 
New hdd units are very sturdy. >50g force to damage the platter and an incorrect voltage may damage the hardware but that is unlikely. Does it/they spin up? Take a look and check your bios can see the drives. If you can see the drives then a power supply interruption has probably left bits of files sprayed in bits all over the hdd as lost files with no names. Try running a rescue programme. Check in windows with control panel and select Administrative Tools, then select Computer Management, then select Disk Management. The drives may be there with no letter allotted to them/it. Right hand click on the disk and choose Change Drive letter and path. Add a letter. If you can't see the drive/s then a low level format may bring them back to life. If that doesn't work, purchase new drive/s. If in a Mac, use Utility manager.
 
Having a fan directly on top won't do a thing to the drive. I sometimes do this at work when testing a drive outside the case.

Check disk management to see if the drive exists then:

If drive does exist run a seatools check or use the diagnostic software from the manufacturer.

If it doesn't exist then check your cabling.
 
This thread is wandering way off course!

NO WAY will adding 12V PC fans affect the drives!

They have excellent total magnetic screening and there are millions of server based drive arrays out there with fans almost touching the drives.

You say both drives have failed. How do you know? Do you have spares that you can swap? If both drives appear not to work, look for some common factor; power supply, controller etc.

If they really have failed you will not be able to reformat them, will you?
 
Hi. Thanks for the replies, much appreciated.

I am trying out your suggestions right now.

Richie00boy. The 4-inch fans were hovering one inch above the hard drives, the fans did come with a splitter already attached, a male 4-pin molex and a female 4-pin molex, i used these to power the fans only.
I am powering the hard drives from a seasonic power supply sata connectors. I thought since the sata and molex from the power supply are on different cables this may provide some separation, but apparently not.
Wondering, if the splitter is the problem why do they sell them like this.

Phofman. The wd scorpio blacks have a reputation for being reliable and come with 5 year warranty so I was hoping by purchasing these i could avoid the headache of lost files, data recovery etc but it has not turned out to be the case.
I'm looking into the smart errors you mentioned, i'm going to put the hard drives into external usb enclosure and run the test from my laptop.

JonSnell Electronic. Thanks for the reply, makes perfect sense.

Woody. Thanks for the recommendation of minitool, I have that installed on my laptop, i've tried a few other partition managers and this is the best one.
I couldn't find Western Digital drive fitness utility on a google search, but did find WD Data Life Guard diagnostic disk.

Feckie. Thanks, i will double check the cabling. One thing i did notice is that the sata cable works loose sometimes, it has a metal clip on it and it clips really securely into the motherboard, but the WD hard drives for some reason cannot be clipped onto, they haven't got that thing for the sata clip, is there a workaround for this.

Cliffforest. Thanks for helping. I'm going to remove the hard drives and put into external usb enclosure so try and isolate them from the pc cabling, or splitters, whatever the problem may be, the re-evaluate from there.

Many thanks. John.
 
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Hi. Thanks for the replies.

Have run the western digital hard drive diagnostic program, in extended mode, took 5 hours per drive and the hard drives passed, didn't give any information, just there was a green tick on screen.
I also ran crystal disc info and the hard drives passed that as well.

What do you think, is this the right thing to do running these two programs, are the drives safe to use or should i use any other program.

The sata cable comes loose sometimes from the hard drive, it has a metal clip and clips really securely to the motherboard, but for the drives it can slip a little. Is there any way to clip the hard drives better, perhaps a different kind of cable.

I've tried recovery programs to get the lost data back, minitool power data recovery gives me the files back but in the same damaged form, stellar phoenix windows data recovery manages to pick up all the pieces and the files are okay but it keeps crashing after recovering a file.

Many thanks
 
What do you think, is this the right thing to do running these two programs, are the drives safe to use or should i use any other program.
Best run something that'll give you their SMART values (usually doesn't work over USB though). But it looks like the drives may be OK, just their content is b0rked for some reason. Run a memory diagnostic on the machine, read out voltages and check for overheating. I am guessing that you accidentally knocked something loose or who knows what when installing the fans. They should not pose any major load to the power supply. (BTW, there is no such thing such as 4" fans, I guess you meant 92 mm. Standard sizes are 40-50-60-80-92-120-140 mm plus some oddballs like 135 mm. Interestingly enough, depths seem to be rooted in the imperial system, as they tend to be values like 25, 32 or 12.5 mm.)
The sata cable comes loose sometimes from the hard drive, it has a metal clip and clips really securely to the motherboard, but for the drives it can slip a little. Is there any way to clip the hard drives better, perhaps a different kind of cable.
It's odd that you should still have issues with these 2nd generation SATA cables, but if in doubt a dab of hot glue should do the job. That's what PC assemblers do anyway. Just don't overdo it, or you may have trouble if you ever wish to remove the cable in the future!

I don't think a loose SATA cable would cause major data corruption though, as transmission is CRC protected. Things would merely get very slow or stop working altogether in one direction. At least that's what happened when I last had this kind of problem.
 
PS - I would also expect funny results if the USB SATA controller has a different idea of harddrive geometry than the motherboard. These days things tend to be all LBA (with potential problems only expected >2 TB), but recently I did come across an older notebook (HPaq nc6400, like 2006/7-ish) where things could be and were set up for Large CHS ("Bit-Shift") for some reason. So when I swapped out the old drive I set this to LBA instead. Thumbs up for smart cloning tools...
 
Yeah, I've bought an Intel S5000XALR motherboard for music server.
Very decent motherboard despite its age (from 2008).
I'm not beginner on the subject and I walked around the topic a thousand times, yet I slipped into bigger-than-2TB issue.
Of course, then I found this somewhere, in an Intel specification sheet.

It's the same when the snake biting its own tail.
It is deadly for the data, unrecoverably.

HDD Sentinel will warns you, if your motherboard can't handle > 2TB hard disk.
 
The OP still has not said what was wrong. He said the drives stopped working, but they check out OK so it sounds like they are working. What was the actual problem? The drives are fine. If the SATA cable fell out that would certainly be a problem, same with the power. We can safely say the fans were not the cause.
 
What motherboard are you using (Manufacturer, model number and revision)? What operating system (32 or 64 bit)? Is the power supply big enough, adding two drives could cause trouble if it was marginal to start with?
I've had two WD drives of 1TB and two 2TB in my everyday desktop for several years and I've not had any issues with any of them.
And if you're having issues with the SATA cables, just replace them, it's cheap peace of mind.

Mike
 
Hi. Thanks for the replies, much appreciated.

I'm going to install hard drive sentinel today and try it out. Will this be enough, or do i need anything else as sgrossklass suggested

The motherboard is gigabyte ga-ma785gpm-ud2h. I purchased this 6 years ago but never used, it has been hanging around in an anti static bag on a shelf, i'm hoping it may be okay because i can't track down why the hard drives failed. Is there any program i can install which may check this motherboard for problems.

I have a 400 watt seasonic power supply which powers :
one 2tb wd black hdd and one 3tb wd black,
4 gigs of generic ram,
for graphics i am using onboard ati radeon 4200, which consumes 7 watts
and for audio asus stxII 7.1 with daughter board
OS is windows xp 64 bit with service pack 2

For the hard drives, the 2tb has the OS and the 3tb is back up. When i say the hard drives failed what happened i lost loads of data from the 3tb drive, the kids had put all their cartoons on there, school work etc and most of the files would now not open in word processor or media player, jpeg viewer etc.

For the 2tb drive the OS loads very slowly, i had put some of my music on there and a few ripped movies and they all work fine, but the OS is getting slower and slower every day.

All the hardware is new i only purchased it a few weeks ago, except the motherboard, that is old but unused.

Many thanks. John.
 
You might want to check if the motherboard and its' BIOS revision supports large drives, if not there may be a BIOS update for that issue. And a 400 watt power supply may be too small, and keep in mind that even in the same power range, not all power supplies are the same, some are definitely better than others. And I just found this, you might want to take a look: Everything You Need to Know About 3TB Hard Drives | PCWorld

Mike
 
I was tried to carry out some research, to find out if your motherboard can handle larger than 2TB HDD. No success.
Even AMD SB710 databook does not contain this information.
So I strongly recommend to you to check this with HDD Sentinel, as I was wrote it above. And if this is the case, very strongly recommend to not to run any HDD correcting program like chkdsk and such.
Because you will get a very nice empty disk.

Regards,

Gyuri
 
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