Computer issue

My current setup is 2 sata drives and an IDE drive. Recently I've been having some problems with my IDE. After a certain amount of up time it would disappear off of the drive lists on My Computer.

I shut down, reseated the cables and checked it out it BIOS, where everything looked ok, brought the system back up and tried to copy a file from the IDE to one of the SATAs. The copy process ended up taking about 5 times longer that it normally would of and then my system froze up.

Upon the next reboot, my drive was no longer showing in MY Computer and was listed as an unallocated drive in Disk Administration. When I tried to use a data recovery app (GetDataBack) to check the files my system froze again.

Next I popped the drive out of the system (it was extremely warm when I removed it)and put it into a USB shell. At the moment it's showing up and acting normally.

One of my next steps is to swap out the IDE cable and give that a go. If that fails does anyone know of a diag utility that might be able to check my mobo? Also what part can heat play on drive performance?

My first guess would be that you're correct in thinking the drive is overheating. If this were my system, I'd first check the temp of the drive while it's acting up (I use speedfan, but there are plenty of proggies out there for this). If it's not the temperature, the drive should read between about 35C and 45C. If you're getting temps around (or over) 50C, your drive is overheating, and will malfunction.

That'd be it. Thanks for the help Pur!

Fripper wrote:

That'd be it. Thanks for the help Pur!

Out of curiosity, what was the temp at?

Well the IDE had cooled down a bit, being out of the case, but my SATAs were running out at about 51. I moved the drives around in the case a bit to increase the airflow and put an extra fan in the system.

At the moment the drives seem to be running between 35 and 45. My concern now is the LM75 temperature which is way above what it should be (127). After digging around google for a bit I found these readings can be inaccurate for ASUS boards, sometimes as much as double. It's still troubling and I'm going to see what I can do to drop those temps as well.