Maxtor problems

[CubKid]

Ok, this is driving me bonkers. I have a 60gb Maxtor drive (unsure of speed, buffer, model, etc..). Here lately its been powering down, and then spinning up within a few seconds. Its my music/files drive, so it dosent get accessed that often, except for playing the next song. Sometimes it freezes my PC briefly, and other times it freezes it to the point that I have to reboot. Any suggestions? My guess is the power supply not having enough power, but it is an older AMD certified Sparkle power supply.

[Chiguy]

What's the wattage of the power supply and what is connected to it?

[muno]

Have you set 'shutdown harddrives' in power management to something or is it 'never'?
-M

[CubKid]

chiguy, its a 250w. Its ran fine up until now (that I know of anyway).

Muno, The only thing that I have set to turn off is the monitor after 20 minutes of being idle.

[Undeadlord]

Ouch,

I didn't even know AMD certified any 250w PS for their CPU's ... I would say 99.9% that the PS is the problem. 250w were back in the day with your P200 and CDROM .. Now we need more POWER!!!

I would suggest atleast a 400w.


Undeadlord

[dunbar]

I'd go to the BIOS first - enable S.M.A.R.T., and see if you can get a SMART application as well.
Same problem just happened to a coworker on his Compaq with a 20 Gig Maxtor (in warranty for the drive, but the PC was out of warranty). On his PC, SMART started throwing errors at bootup, drive would power down despite BIOS settings to leave the drive on, came on suddenly, exactly as you describe. Drive was considered bad by Compaq/HP so they replaced it with a WD.

[CubKid]

I'll try the S.M.A.R.T. thing, then go from there. This is an older slot A athlon. Tiger also lied about the power supply when the system was bought. They said it was a 300watt and it was only a 250... Its too late to say anything now.

[Chiguy]

250W does seem kinda low. You could try disconnecting other devices and see if that works.

[ragtop]

Download and run the Maxtor diagnostics program. It does a pretty good job of finding problems with drives that are going bad.

If the computer worked this long, I doubt the problem is an undersized power supply - although it could be an intermittent loss of power due to a loose connection, etc.

I recently had a machine that I replaced the hard drive three times, only to find out there was a loose connection inside the power supply that was intermittently cutting power to the drive. That computer had a similar symptom, where the hard drive would just suddenly shut down, locking up the system.

[dunbar]

I agree with ragtops point about doubting the power supply size on the first attempt to fix the problem - the loads on a PC power supply are not all 'on at the same time' and all 'at maximum at the same time'; the typical loads on a PC power supply from a PC which is just surfing (without using any heavy CDROM, hard disk, DVD and 3-d graphics all at the same time) - that load will be much less than 200 watts, most likely well below 250 watt ratings in total and also most likely below individual output ratings for loads.

One bit of advice I'd have about all this - make backups of any data, if you have not already done so!

ragtop also makes another good point: make sure all cables, internal and external; power cables, datacables, power cord, etc are firmly connected.