I've seen this multiple HDD failure scenario twice in the past four years
and, heard about one other case a friend encountered 10 years ago.

The first time I encountered this problem was with an fairly expensive DEC
server. It was covered under warranty and the regular field techs from DEC
replaced both (very $$$) HDD's quickly. Within a couple weeks both drives
were dead again, this time the techs replaced the SCSI RAID controller and
both HDD's with units from a different supplier. Well within a couple more
weeks the HDD's were dead again. This is when I asked a friend if he'd ever
seen a similar problem. He had seen it one time when he worked making
industrial PC's, it had turned out that the power supply was intermittently
surging the 12V lines only. When DEC sent out their senior field tech to
look at the problem I mentioned the power supply scenario and he thought it
was worth a try. With a new power supply and two more HDD's that server has
now worked flawlessly for four years.

The next time I saw this problem was just two weeks ago on one of my home
servers. At first it seemed like I had a normal single drive failure so I
pulled the dead drive and slapped in a spare but I couldn't get it
recognized by BIOS. After swapping things around and trying other drives I
figured out that the other HDD was also partially damaged in that it would
no longer allow a slave drive to work. Since PC power supplies are less
expensive than good HDD's I replaced the power supply before installing any
new drives.

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Sean Breheny
> Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 3:39 PM
> Subject: [OT]: Double HD failure
>
> I have a computer that had two Maxtor drives (a 60GB 5T060H6 and an 80GB
> 98196h8, both IDE Ultra ATA/100s) fail at the same time (or close to the
> same
> time). One of them is making clicking sounds often while running and the
> other makes no strange noises but neither gets recognized on that
> computer or on any other I've tried. They were both on the same IDE
> interface card (a Promise Technology ULTRA ATA/100 card, which was
> necessary because this is a server and has no built-in IDE interface),
> but they were both masters on separate connectors on the card (primary
> and secondary).
>
> They were only about 1.5 years old and worked fine up until recently.
> I've had very good luck with Maxtors in general, and I've NEVER had two
> HDs die at the same time.
>
> Any ideas what might have happened?
>
> Sean

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