Maxtor Sata drive burning hot, then fails...

[Yan]

Ill resume the storie as fast as possible.

Bought a Sata drive a few weeks ago, Maxtor 300gb. Installed it and started hearing very high pitch sound comming from PSU. bought new PSU, sound gone, happy. That was 2 days ago, today i turn on my pc, work on it for about 20 minutes. I went to turn on Everest to check temp, i do this regularly cos my GPU tends to run hot. Computer freezes... I reset, at boot i notice the Sata isn't found by the Bios, once windows started i confirm that it isn't there anymore,and in Everest my good old 80gb hd is running at 54 C, after 15 minutes of browsing the next. I put my hand on the sata drive, burning hot, as in you can't leave your fingers on it for long, and its warming up my older hd which sits just above. Bios cannot find it, right now i unplugged it, hope it isn't dead... i never even used it yet, was about to install windows on it next week to retire my old HD, there isn't even any data on it yet.

Whats going on? can anyone help?

 

[Codesmith]

If your chipset overheats parts of it may fail either permanently or until they cool down such as the SATA controller.

My best guess is your room is hot and your case has poor ventilation so everything inside is overheating.

Another guess is your hard drive are too close together to operate without a fan blowing on them. I chose cases where the intake fan blows across a hard drive cage. Makes the drives outlast their warranties.

If the drive is vibrating as well as running hot it could be a mechanical problem with the motor which will get worse as time goes on.

If it gets to the point where outside your case it will walk across you desk when powered then its time to do an advance replacment RMA.

Also dust can insulate componentes and cause overheating of parts that usually are air cooled without the need of a heatsink.

Running full diagnostics never hurt (prime 95 priority 10 large FFT's), Memtest 86, full hard drive diagnostics, Sandra Burn in Wizzard, looping 3dMark 05. Give it a good enough workout and its bound to bring any problems to the surface. Sandra's environmental monitor is useful to monitor temps durring the non-Sandra tests.

Its its heat running the system with the case off or in extreme cases with a room fan blowing on its insides is a good stopgap measure until a new case/more/better fans can be obtained.