USB hdd problem

[lee551]

clicking and stalling may also be the result of an HD having damaged sectors. sometimes they are present on brand new drives, which would qualify as a defect... but they can appear after a while, through completely normal use. that's normally how hard drives wear out: the surface of the disc developing dead spots, rather than the motor wearing out.

so you might wanna run a disc-checking program on it to look for damaged sectors.

thanks for the tip. i'll run a disc-check when i get home.

[spudmessy]

Swapping out your PSU might have solved your problem, but NOT because power was "draining" from unused connectors.
Unless you saw arcing from a Molex to a nearby ground then you weren't leaking power...more likely, the original unit was either getting old and degrading or just plain defective.

Yeah I couldn't figure that out too, It works prefectly fine now. I took out 1 spare IDE cable, 4 power splitters. The "ticking" sound went away after that.

Weird...

[lynx]

The molex power conectors are good for the first connection, but because of their construction they have a resistance penalty compared to simple copper wire. If you had several splitters in series there's a good chance that the voltage reaching the drive was well below specification.

Refering back to the original problem, it is likely that the cause is either a faulty drive (test it in the pc directly if you can) or a faulty psu in the external unit. You can check the basic voltages with a multimeter (with the drive connected), but it is almost impossible to check for voltage stability without some very expensive equipment.

Unfortunately very small psu's are notoriously susceptible to voltage instability (more accurately known as line ripple) and digital equipment certainly doesn't like that.