When upgrading a PC, always do this!
I got up this morning to work on my annual report of earnings from stock photography, but found that three of my hard drives were missing in Windows (and the BIOS). Back in March I built a new PC with the latest technology. However, the power supply was still in good shape so I reused that. I had some issues at the time because the new motherboard had two power sockets for the CPU and my power supply only had one, but even so it worked fine. I was always a bit uncertain as to whether I was getting the full speed out of the new build because of that, and so at the end of December I decided to spend some money on a new power supply and bought a Super Flower Leadex III. I fitted it yesterday and thought everything was fine until I noticed that those hard drives were gone.
Much investigation later, I realize a fatal error had been made. I saw that the SATA cables which power the hard drives were of a common design – they plugged into the power supply with the same 6 pin plug and so I reused them rather than thread new cables through the chassis. My first step this morning was to change out those old cables for the ones that came with the PSU, but still no joy with the hard drives. Finally I saw an article that mentioned that you should never use the old cables – the pinout on the component side (the hard drive connector) is standardized, but the pin layout on the power supply side is not – it is up to the manufacturer. So I pulled out the hard drives and tested them in a USB box I have – all of them dead – nothing… I have been building computers for probably 15 years, but have never come across that before!
So this simple upgrade that may or may not make any difference to my PC performance has resulted in the loss of 6TB, 4TB and 3TB hard drives…
So the motto is – NEVER, EVER use the same cables with a new Power Supply. And I guess a second motto is to always have a backup strategy for your photos and personal information! I will see in a few days if my strategy really worked as I hoped!
I’m sorry 🙁 I hope that you will easily recover copies of data. And for the future, buy a ready-made Mac, it is the cheapest
I must admit I have learned a massive lesson here. Not so sure about the MAC however!
Luckily, failed control boards are a relatively easy fix, so all is not lost, but will require finding one that is an exact match for each failed drive as a replacement.
I didn’t know you could do that. I have ordered two new 8TB drives and just planned to restore my backups to those.
Wow, must be heartbreaking and absolutely surprising. In spite of my enterprise level experience in IT I would do the same mistake.
Steve:
Sorry to hear bout your issue. I have had some much less minor issues with some loss of data, but nothing like the scary event you have experienced. I know that pit-in-the-stomach feeling you must have had. Thankfully you have a backup strategy and hopefully all will go well!
I am sending my best wishes. Please let us know how this works out!
PS – From following you, I assume you have a scientific background of some sort!
Good luck!
Holy crap! I have built dozens of PCs, and I’d never heard of such thing. You have just saved some future myself from a huuuuuge headache.
Yes, it was a big surprise to me! The update is that my backup strategy worked – all 110,000 images are now back on the new drives that I added to my PC and as far as I can see, nothing was lost. So all’s well that ends well! Apart from the cost of two new 8TB hard drives!