Hi all, my first post here, which I can't believe considering how often I visit this site.
Anyway I have what is now an ageing system, but still performs very well (based on an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe board, 2GB RAM, 4200+ Dual Core CPU) It's always done very well and I see no need to upgrade it as I don't need the latest games etc, and Windows 7 flies along perfectly well.
However, in the system I have three hard drives, 2xMaxtor (160GB and 80GB) and my main boot drive, a 320GB Seagate Barracuda. The Maxtor drives have been in the system since I built it, circa 2005, and I could understand if one or both of them had started to go a bit dodgy (which they have), but my Seagate drive is also on its last legs it seems, and all of this has happened fairly recently.
I've ran SeaTools on the Seagate drive, and it found errors and said it had 'repaired them' and when reading the help file I assume it did this by using spare sectors, but it won't test the Maxtor drives (despite Seagate now owning Maxtor and the website saying to use Seatools on legacy drives too)
Is it just a bad coincidence that my drives could all be failing at this time? I would usually back up files to one of the other drives, but I don't trust any of them. What sort of factors could cause faults like this, I have tried replacing the SATA cables as I thought maybe they had gone bad (they were the originals that came with the motherboard) but I am not sure if this was the issue. I'm at this stage where I'm thinking, is it the drives that are completely knackered, or is the SATA controller/OS causing problems? I have S.M.A.R.T enabled in the BIOS and all the drives pass on this.
Any help would be brilliant.
Anyway I have what is now an ageing system, but still performs very well (based on an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe board, 2GB RAM, 4200+ Dual Core CPU) It's always done very well and I see no need to upgrade it as I don't need the latest games etc, and Windows 7 flies along perfectly well.
However, in the system I have three hard drives, 2xMaxtor (160GB and 80GB) and my main boot drive, a 320GB Seagate Barracuda. The Maxtor drives have been in the system since I built it, circa 2005, and I could understand if one or both of them had started to go a bit dodgy (which they have), but my Seagate drive is also on its last legs it seems, and all of this has happened fairly recently.
I've ran SeaTools on the Seagate drive, and it found errors and said it had 'repaired them' and when reading the help file I assume it did this by using spare sectors, but it won't test the Maxtor drives (despite Seagate now owning Maxtor and the website saying to use Seatools on legacy drives too)
Is it just a bad coincidence that my drives could all be failing at this time? I would usually back up files to one of the other drives, but I don't trust any of them. What sort of factors could cause faults like this, I have tried replacing the SATA cables as I thought maybe they had gone bad (they were the originals that came with the motherboard) but I am not sure if this was the issue. I'm at this stage where I'm thinking, is it the drives that are completely knackered, or is the SATA controller/OS causing problems? I have S.M.A.R.T enabled in the BIOS and all the drives pass on this.
Any help would be brilliant.