We recently have a computer with 3 out of 5 HD going bad (excessive bad sectors) within 1 week. This got me to start thinking that maybe it's the power supply. What are some warning signs / tricks to tell when the power supply is about to go? before it completely stop working.
I read on another thread on SF about power supply tester. It looks helpful if the PSU has a faulty rail, but will those catch intermittent errors that might happen before a supply goes bad?
Best Answer
What you need to catch are voltage drops and spikes, some less than 100ms long, and that over a period of serveral hours. That power supply tester won't catch those, and I don't know of any device that does.
You can hook up a sensitive voltmeter, if you can see the voltage vary there's definitely a problem, but it won't catch all problems.
There is also another possibility: you could have drives all from the same bad batch.
In this case I would take no chances. Replace the PSU and start transferring data to fresh drives.