Bad power damage Hard drive

Symptom: This summer, the author upgraded the original machine, purchased the I845GL motherboard and P4 Celeron 1.8GHz CPU. To save money, the original monitor and 20GB 5400rpm hard drive are retained and the chassis and power supply are configured with more than 100 yuan. The machine started to run normally, and one months later I found that the hard drive sometimes creaked when reading and writing data, but it didn't care. After a period of time, the boot BIOS self-test when the hard drive issued a "crunch" sound, the ScreenTip can not find the hard drive. After some testing, it turns out that the hard drive is broken. May be the old hard drive life, so I changed a piece of Seagate 40GB 7200rpm hard disk. But in less than one months, the hard drive went bad again.

Analysis to solve: what is the cause of hard disk frequently damaged it. I will remove all parts one by one down for inspection, upgrade before the motherboard, CPU, chassis and power supply, other accessories work has been normal, should be no problem, so check the focus on the replacement of accessories. After the replacement test, the motherboard and CPU are OK, and the chassis does not seem to be a problem, it seems that the biggest "suspect" should be the price of the cheap, a motley power. I replaced a better quality brand power supply, and purchased a new hard drive, use so far no more problems.

Summary: Due to poor quality power supply and output voltage ripple large, resulting in the hard drive operation is not normal, failure.

The power supply is the power source of each part of the computer, many assembling machine's problem is related to the power quality. The harm of inferior power source mainly manifests in the following several aspects: 1. Rough workmanship; 2. Eliminates EMI filter (inductance, capacitance, etc.), anti-interference ability is poor, from any interference from the power grid will make the normal operation of the machine affected, resulting in panic, program errors, speakers have a murmur, etc. 3. Output voltage instability and no protection circuit, easy to damage other devices; 4. Insufficient output power, resulting in poor optical drive reading ability. We recommend that users choose good quality, large output power and smooth power supply, do not save money on the power supply.