About a month ago my Seagate Barracuda XT died. Because of the noise it sounded like it might be the heads so I sent it off to Drive Savers. They told me it was in fact a head failure and was unrecoverable (data wasn't that important anyway, just a nuisance to lose it). So I buy 3 Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 3TB hard drives to replace it. I place 2 in RAID 1 and use the third as a backup, and my boot disk is a SSD. Run MHDD and seatools to check the drives, 0 write, no bad sectors found.

Everything works great for a couple weeks, then Windows 7 suddenly goes from taking 18 seconds to boot to 56 seconds. I unplug the RAID1 Drives, nothing changes. When I unplug drive F (the backup drive not in RAID1) Windows boots in 18 seconds. Strange that a disk would suddenly cause that when it was booting in 18 seconds with it installed on the previous boot before the sudden issue. I reinstall windows on my SSD, doesn't solve it. I replace the sata cable, doesn't solve it. I reformat Drive F, windows goes back to 18 second boot times. Somehow the data on it was causing slow boots?

I restore the data to drive F and everything works great for 3 days, still boots in 18 seconds. Weird. I install drivers for a Focusrite 2i4 external audio interface today, reboot, Drive F is gone. To be fair it could have died before the reboot and be a completely unrelated issue to all of this, I don't know. Last time I had accessed data from it was about an hour earlier, but I think I recall it still being listed in windows explorer right before I install the Focusrite drivers. Anyway, I checked BIOS and BIOS doesn't see it as even existing. Change sata cable, still gone. Pull it out to power it up and listen to it and it doesn't make a peep or even attempt to spin up, which makes me think it's the PCB. The RAID1 drives are still working.

I'm going to go ahead and RMA, but I was wondering if:

1) Does anyone know if installing a driver could overwrite HDD firmware somehow or kill a hard drive?

2) Could this be caused by a power/power supply issue? I have a backup battery going into my power supply as well. If that goes bad and doesn't supply enough power to the power supply could it cause issues like this or would my computer just lose power?

3) Could it be the sata power cable? That's one of the things I didn't try replacing. The sata power cable that was powering drive F was also powering one of the drives in RAID1 and that drive is still up and running fine. Some of my sata power cables have enough connectors for 4 drives. I was only powering two. How many drives is it safe to power off a single sata power cable?

4) Anyone have insight on the strange boot time issue that was solved by clearing the disk? This makes no sense to me. It's not my boot drive, my SSD is my boot drive.

Trying to learn a little about how to troubleshoot these kinds of issues.

If it's not spinning at all, it's either mechanical or PCB related. So, I don't think a driver could have any impact on this. Power supply could mess up PCB or cause mechanical damage, but unlikely the cause of the problem I think (since no other drives/components have power issues). The slowness made me think "firmware problem", but maybe your OS was just indexing the drive and slowing down? Or the drive had bad/slow sectors. Either way, RMA and be done with it.

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