Hello. I was wondering if i could get some suggestions here. Over the last four months i have had two western digital 40gig harddrives fail on me. The first one i bought at a best buy in california and formatted/installed it myself. The second i bought in Lawrence Kansas, and it came preformatted. The first problems they would begin show was running slow. i would copy a file to the drive and it would take an extended amount of time. I noticed that the room the computer was in got rather hot at night, and the drives themselves would get a little warm. But before too long both, after running slow for a while, began to display syndromes of failing. The OS (xp w/1.4 and 256) would not recognize the drive. I would reformat it, it would run slower and slower till it would not be recognized by the OS again. They also emitted a noise occasionally, kind of like a floppy running. I have never had two drives fail one after another like this. They were both set up as slaves, and my master drive, a 30 gig Maxtor has just be chuggin along for the last three years without any problems...
so, what do you think...will overheating cause a drive to fail? are the drives really ok and i just messed up the formatting (i used Partition Magic 8.0)? is is a problem with my mother board? cables? or were they just bad drives?
any help would be great,
kunfused in kansas

It could be a heat problem. Last summer I read here about a program called "speedfan" and it's able to measure the temperature. With 35°C in my room then I tried it and two of my harddrives had around 65°C, 5°C more than my cpu!

I don't know about the newer western digital drives but I have a 1,5GB drive in a removable rack and it became much hotter than my other two drives until I removed the DVD from directly above that slot!

Try speedfan and if your drives are above 40-45°C it's time for a additional fan that blows directly to the harddrives!

hello
have you ever run hard drive diagnostic utility's on these drives?

the strangest thing is i have ran norton disc doctor and windows scandisc and they say that all is good. the discs just get slower and slower and then become unreadable. reformat and defrag scan disc all is well. eventually the second one got to where it hangs up the system if i try to access it, even though 15 minutes before it was functioning...never buying a western digital again...which is the best brand/size for a budget of, say, 150.00?
thanks for the feedback
quincy
arg