Multiple Hardrive failure over the course of a year

CountMike said:

Those WD Black are made for speed, RAID0 is specially vulnerable to any errors and require closely matched drives.

The two drives that are mirror of one another, are both WD Blacks 1 tb. Do tou suggest a different type of drive for raid 0?
I need raid 0 because my career is graphic design and all my work files are stored there. If I have any failures i can't afford to lose those files. So raid 0 is a necessity. So if you have any suggestions they are welcome! I Do know that it will not solve my issue currently but it will "offset it" at the very least until i can find a more permanent solution.

Is it possible that maybe i just have really bad Luck? The only reason I even thought it might be some under lying cause is because microcenter techs told me that this is odd and could be something else causing them to go bad. When I asked what could it be they offered a 40$ diagnostics. So I dont know if they are just trying to sell me things or if it may actually be something wrong. I do know that this type of thing is unusual but not un heard of, I have heard stories of people having bad drives alot. It seems the quality of mechanical drives has dipped significantly, since SSD are going to soon make them obsolete.

Anyway to test it without faking it to the shop? There's no programs I can download to test the rails on my psu?

Possible explanations regarding original post:
1. PSU is causing damage to the HDDs
2. Mis-use
3. Hard Drives aren't actually dead
4. Heat damage

Option 1 seems the most likely
Option 2 is possible, but SSDs are especially hard to abuse so I doubt this
Option 3 is plausible, what symptoms did the drives give?
Option 4 is more plausible with the HDDs than the SSD I think, whats your PC setup like? Do the hard drives sit where fresh (cold) air comes in, or is there no fan? Or are they near the exhaust?

Etetherin said:

The story is: in 2015 I had to replace 2 barracudas (I know they are terrible anyways) but then i went and got two 1 TB WD Blacks and one WD SSD 250gb and reset my computer with a fresh install of windows 10 x64 pro. two weeks later one of the WD blacks went bad. went and replaced it rebuilt my raid, and then it worked fine for like 3 months. Now my SSD went bad and i had it exchanged. )

OK, let us clear up the configuration and what actually happened. From what you have said, your computer is a laptop which has an SSD as the main drive. The SSD had to be replaced after about 3 months because it went bad. In addition, you have two external drives that were previously Barracudas but are now WD Black 1TBs. One of the Barracudas went bad so you replaced both with WDs. Then shortly after, one of the WDs went bad. So in the last year or less it sounds, you have had 3 drives go bad; 1 internal SSD, 1 external Barracuda, and 1 external WD black. Is that correct? Now, as for the physical setup; the external drives, are they inserted into some sort of external bay with its own controller? If so, how does this controller interface to your laptop - with a USB cable? If the external hard drives are in their own, self-powered bay and are not powered from your laptop, then I don't see how a power supply problem can take out both the internal and external drives. In that case the only likely way I see that power could affect both the internal and external and cause damage is if your laptop is not using a battery but is instead running only off the charger with no battery (or a bad battery) and your externals are running off wall power also. Then if wall power is shut off, both the internal and externals could be negatively affected if they are in the middle of doing an operation. It is not good to shut off power to hard drives while they are operating without having your computer go through the normal shut down sequence. So, a couple questions:
1. You are not shutting on/off power to everything with a switch (or unplugging) while things are running are you?
2. Is your laptop running with a battery installed so that if 120V power is shut off, the laptop does not immediately shut off while the drive is in the middle of an operation?
3. Is the above assumed number of failed drives and configuration correct?

I will retell the story I am sorry for the confusion.

This is on a desktop that I built myself.
It originally had 2 2tb baracudas in it. One went bad I repaired it then they both went bad (one went bad 2 times) they worked for maybe a year before the first failure. Then two weeks after the repair they failed.

I went and got one WD SSD Internal and two wd blacks also internal.
Got that build all set up with windows on it and about two or three days later one of the wd blacks failed. (the blacks are part of the raid. The ssd is not)
I got the failed black RMAd and put the new one in. My computer worked fine for about 3 months and then the ssd failed.


MY CURRENT PC SPECS ON MY ACCOUNT HERE ARE FOR MY LAPTOP NOT THE DESKTOP THIS PROBLEM IS TAKING PLACE ON. (I have to get the desktop running again before I can run the tool that updates my PC specs here. But I am wanting to figure out and fix the underlying cause so I can not ruin this fresh ssd I just got.

Now to answer your relevant questions with this new information I have given.

1. I always use the button and I have it set to safely shut down the computer when pressed once and let go.
2. Not relevant any longer
3. Also not relevant (sorry about the confusion, words are hard)

Any more questions Ai will answer them asap :)

joedaman633 said:

Possible explanations regarding original post:
1. PSU is causing damage to the HDDs
2. Mis-use
3. Hard Drives aren't actually dead
4. Heat damage

Option 1 seems the most likely
Option 2 is possible, but SSDs are especially hard to abuse so I doubt this
Option 3 is plausible, what symptoms did the drives give?
Option 4 is more plausible with the HDDs than the SSD I think, whats your PC setup like? Do the hard drives sit where fresh (cold) air comes in, or is there no fan? Or are they near the exhaust?

I dont know how to check the psu. Other then someone mentioned to take it to a store.
I dont use them for any over locking or ridiculous read write, except a Minecraft server.
The drives I am almost certain were bad. On all cases except the ssd I tested with a hard drive checking utility and got read bars. (failures in sectors) and with the ssd windows 10 wouldn't boot and kept telling me to check the status of my drive. And it would act as if it wasn't plugged in sometimes (go to a screen asking me to select a Boot media.)
Lastly my setup is like this:
The hard drives are in a from cavity area with a fan sucking in fresh air across them on one side of them and then on the other side a fan sucking air from the cavity towards the back of the machine. Which then flows across my CPU fan. There is another fan blowing air put of the case at the back and then two on top blowing air out of the case as well. And one additional fan sucking air in on the side toward my CPU (i5). I dont think heat damage is likely but you never know.

I also do not let it go more then about a month without blowing the dust out of my fans and other hardware.

Be sure to understand that the purpose of RAID 1, or any other form of RAID for that matter, is NOT to protect your data. There are a variety of situations in which it will not do that. The purpose of RAID 1 is to maintain access to your data in the event of drive failure, not to protect the data itself. To protect your data you need to maintain backups. 1 backup copy for data of any importance, 2 or more backup copies if the files are of particular importance. There is no other way.

There really is no practical way you can test the PSU yourself. If the PSU is not of good quality it should be replaced, whether it is causing this specific problem or not, no matter what it's ratings might be. If you could tell us what PSU you have someone can advise you on that.