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Hard Drive failure following unstable overclock - coincidence?

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Rustprooftom

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Discussion starter · #1 ·
Hi. Sorry if I'm stepping all over the rules, new to this and all forums.

I was recently trying to breathe some life into an older machine and found that my CPU was ripe for overclocking. I jumped in quicker than I should have, primarily watching temps but less good at tracking stability. Ended up very unstable so I dropped everything back down to CMOS default, but continued to have booting issues. Worsened until my HDD would not boot at all. I was able to start up with a different HDD, and even access the files I wanted by hooking up the first HDD as a second drive, but still cannot boot with it (inaccessible boot drive error, continual BSOD, restore failed).

My question - in pushing overclocking too hard/fast, could I have damaged the HDD either physically or logically? I've got new drives on order, but don't want to damage new ones too once I install them and go for another round of this. I think I probably need to follow all the directions on here and other sites telling me to take it slow! :)

What I haven't found is anything talking about hard drive failure due to overclocking. Could this just be coincidental? HD is five years old, could just be failing due to age, but its fishy to me that it was fine until this misadventure.

When overclocking I started just with CPU clock ratio, but then included the CPU NB Freq as well. I had topped out at a 19x CPU clock with a slightly increased NB frequency (didn't document numbers but increased from default by a few multiples) to bring me up to 3.9Ghz, but I never got that stable.

My system:
AMD Phenom 2 X4 955 BE
Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB 3 AM3+
Cooler Master Seidon 120v
Corsaire XMS3 DDR3 1333 2x4GB
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB
Sparkle GeForce GTX 550 Ti
Cooler Master RS-500

Thanks!


Tom
 
#2 ·
Hi,
Can't say I've ever oc'ed on an hdd it wouldn't be all that great of rewards seeing even 860 evo ssd's are dirt cheap at 250gb.

But yes oc 101 is create a system image on a detached hdd before attempting oc :)
 
#4 ·
An unstable overclock can result in filesystem corruption due to the CPU not functioning properly. There shouldn't be a hardware issue with the drive itself. If there is a hardware issue, it is unrelated to the overclock. That's why you should proceed slowly, and regardless of the overclock, keep your files backed up. I personally use one drive, as you can get an office 365 subscription and a terabyte of space for a great price per year. There are also other options.
 
#5 ·
The PSU in that system is god awful and a fire hazard so you should not be overclocking any system with a PSU like that
Your crappy PSU might have killed your HDD and by the way the 12v rail is not rated for more than 360 watts

hardocp said about that PSU and i qoute from that reivew from 2009

The AcBel built Cooler Master eXtreme Power 500w is certainly one of the older and lower end designs in today's roundup and as such it really isn't surprising that it is not the top unit today. While the unit was able to output its claimed capacity at 45c (and at 100v AC input) it was not a great unit or even a passing unit as the DC Output Quality was just plain bad at full load. The unitآ’s component selection and build quality are far from top notch, the efficiency peaked at ~77% and bottomed out at ~71%. The DC Output Quality was out of specification limits at full load on ALL of the rails at 100v. At the current price of $49.99 the eXtreme Power 500w is certainly not an آ“eXtremelyآ” amazing buy as it did not cleanly pass testing.

In short the Cooler Master eXtreme Power sucks and i would not trust it to power a toaster
 
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#6 ·
Do you know for a fact it's actually a HDD failure or could it be just boot sector corruption? Blocks on HDDs go bad over time, including blocks in the boot sector. Collect all your data off the drive and then hard format it.

Agree with TZ. Get an SSD. I personally install Windows into a 40GB boot partition and install all my applications to a separate partition D: drive. Makes it easy to restore Windows if it becomes corrupted. I use the free software MiniTool Partition Wizard to define partitions and to back whole partitions up onto other drives. Simple.
 
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Discussion starter · #7 ·
Beagle Box - I don't know the level of failure yet, as I noted it failed to boot but I could access files. I assumed the worst and scrambled to get my files off, haven't yet gone further. But yes, it could be boot sector corruption.

And absolutely, SSD is en rte for the system with a new HDD for storage, my plan is what you and TZ mentioned below, I just don't want to replicate the same issues with new eqpt.

betam4x - thanks for the info, that's exactly what I was looking for. So on the down side I caused my own problems, but on the upside my HDD might be ok, just old. Due to be replaced in either case.

shilka - thanks for the heads up on the PSU. I'm tracking it's budget end, but hadn't any issues so far with it burning out components. On the 12V rail - I thought that power was primarily for CPU and GPU. The GTX 550 TI needs 116W max with the Phenom using 125W (I'm assuming that's its draw at non-OC and it would head upwards as V increases). With those two major draws totaling ~240W, doesn't 360W give me a good amount of headroom for the other draws on that rail? Or am I out to lunch?
 
#8 ·
Rustprooftom said:
Sorry ThrashZone, I didn’t take any action to OC the HDD itself, just the CPU.
Click to expand...
You can't OC a HDD :eek:

He meant that your OC was unstable and it in turn wrote incorrect/corrupt data to your drive. If your system is in the process of booting and crashes because the CPU is unstable it can corrupt whatever data is being accessed when the crash happens.
 
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#9 · (Edited)
Rustprooftom said:
shilka - thanks for the heads up on the PSU. I'm tracking it's budget end, but hadn't any issues so far with it burning out components. On the 12V rail - I thought that power was primarily for CPU and GPU. The GTX 550 TI needs 116W max with the Phenom using 125W (I'm assuming that's its draw at non-OC and it would head upwards as V increases). With those two major draws totaling ~240W, doesn't 360W give me a good amount of headroom for the other draws on that rail? Or am I out to lunch?
Click to expand...
A PSU like that will lose some of its rated wattage over time so its probably not going to be able to do even its rated 360 watts anymore
Cant say how much it has lost over the years but given how crappy it was even 9 years ago i would be surprised if it can do 280 watts today

Please throw it out and get a new PSU before you have dead hardware or worse a fire in an extreme case
The review from 2009 said it was old back then so the design is probably from somewhere around 2005-2007 or maybe older

Edit: The efficiency on the PSU sucks as well and it drops as low as 71% where even a cheap modern unit would be pressed to drop much below 80% and high end units can do up to 96%
As a result its drawing at least 10% and probably more like 15-20% more power out of the wall then a modern unit would do

In short its wasting a lot power and turning into heat so you could actually save a fair bit of money over time on your power bill by buying something with higer efficiency
There is a reason why i said its god awful and i have not even talked about voltage regulation and ripple suppression yet which are just a joke on that PSU
 
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#10 ·
Can't remember now but that HDD may have been one of the models that had high failure rates from Seagate for a period of time. Try formatting as suggested above. That PSU is maybe ok for web browsing,but pulling 150w from an overclocked Phenom II is not something I would recommend either.
 
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