Please help, 3 hard drive in a row are failing, it's driving me nuts!

** Before I start just wanted to say that I posted the same topic on a different forum. If this is not allowed I understand and thus feel free to delete my post.

Hi there,

I'm having a hard time with the internal hard drive of my Alienware Area-51 Threadripper.
I've been using this computer for two years now with only an initial issue which has been resolved at the time (defective CPU)

In the past two months the internal hard drive, a Seagate 2TB, started giving me errors with folders disappearing. After a restart sometimes they were reappearing, when they were not a standard windows check disk would fix the problem.
It got worse to the point that I added two new drives, so I could use one for a constant backup and the other for work.
Now the two new drives, which I installed two days ago, are showing signs of the same issue! Folders are disappearing and I don't know what else to do.

I did some virus scan but everything looks fine. Dell remotely connected to check the computer, we spent hours and they couldn't find anything unusual.

But the problem is still here! What else now?

I also run a memtest for hours with no issues either.

I've been using this computer for about 2 years now and I started getting this issue only a couple of months ago.
The common element among the three drives is that, since I use them for work I copied the same files on all of them because I need to access those files. Lots of assets (textures, 3d elements, clips and so on).
A friend of mine suggested it could even be a corrupted file(s) causing the issue and the fact that I'm carrying the same archives could corroborate that hypothesis.

Hope someone has some ideas because this is driving crazy. I use my computer for work and I can't keep working with the constant stress of possibly losing sensitive data.

Sounds like it might be a problem with either the SATA ports the SATA controller on the motherboard or just bad SATA cables
A short in the dark would be the SATA controller but it could be any of the 3

What you can do is if you have a free PCI-E slot you could buy a PCI-E board with a SATA controller and SATA ports thereby bypasing the motherboard SATA ports and controller completely

Thank you, shilka

The SATA crossed my mind and then I forgot about it.
I have another PCI-E available but the cables need to be quite long as the hard drives on the Area 51 R3 are located on the other side of the mainboard.
At this point, I'll suggest the idea to Dell directly and see if they can work on the SATA themselves.

Thanks for the hint!!

EDIT: or I could use an external dock

Do you have turn off hard disk disabled, in windows. Sometimes with the hard drive spinning up and down all the time it will damage them.

Even if you ask Windows 10 not to power down your HDD´s Windows 10 will sometimes ignore that and still turn the HDD´s off
Its a bug in APM and the only way to override that cursed bug is to download Hard Drive Sentinel and tell Hard Drive Sentinel to force override the APM bug so the HDD´s wont be turned off

Edit: if Windows is trying to turn off your HDD´s and you have the APM bug the HDD´s will make a very annoying chink noise
This noise comes from the HDD´s when Windows is telling the drive head to go into park mode and then the head immediately goes back into read mode and the chink noise comes from that

This APM bug will keep telling your drive head to into park mode and then as said it immediately goes back into read mode and the back and forth movement of the drive head ruins it over time

I have had this happen to me when i moved from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and it took me countless hours trying to fix it before someone here on OCN said Hard Drive Sentinel can force override the APM bug

Hi,
Wonder if 2014 repeat
https://www.neowin.net/news/seagate-...leads-the-pack

2016 repeat
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...-failure-rates

Interesting indeed.

I have at least 15 of 4TB to 8TB drives that are 8-10 years old with 0 CRC Error Count and I haven't had single drive failure yet in 2 decades, call me a liar but its true. I have some 20 year old recently retired drives that I like to keep for fun, they are in storage but from time to time I will start them up for few min and check their health and they also have 0 CRC Error Count and that is the first thing that would indicate drive might be heading south.

This is only my suspicion, what I'm wondering, If you have poor quality PSU that ripples like crazy without you knowing it if you don't check it routinely, It will send dirty power to you drives and if you don't use quality UPS it will destroy your drives first before anything else, that in combination with possibly bad source of connection cables somewhere in the mix.

You'd be surprise to see when everything runs smooth, then UPS gets triggered by either your PSU or wall receptacle spiking dirty power.

What PSU is in the system?

Hi,
At some point you have to try another brand
HDD's are pretty dirt cheap
I've always gone WD black but i do have a couple blues also nothing to report in failure 3.5 and 2.5" versions.

I don't know what on earth happen to my above post I think my keyboord crapping out on me, all this misspell and grammar