Drive trouble
 

I have some strange occasional problem with power to one of my IDE drives - not sure if it is connectors (all swapped endlessly) or yet another (spit) Maxtor drive dying. I have run Maxtor diagnostics and looked at the Smart output and it shows nothing. I've checked my PSU - 4 hards, a floppy, DVD, 2 x PCI cards and 1GB RAM and although 400W is 'skimpy' it is reckoned to be enough. Are there any other diagnostics anyone can recommend to track down the problem?

Tried chkdsk? TBH, drives are so cheap, I would simply swap out any I suspected of circling the drain.

Yes, chkdsk comes up clean - I'm loath to put a new drive onto a dodgy power connector! I guess I'd best buy some new connectors (again) and see if that fixes it.

Power supply
 

PCPLUS recently supplied a link to an online calculator which indicates the power supply needed for your particular computer :-

eXtreme Outer Vision - eXtreme tools for computer enthusiasts

Might be worth checking since you are running 4 hard drives.

The other thing to check is your drive cables.

I had a ribbon cable which failed due to an overheating graphics card (a wire was touching the centre of the fan, so no noise but slow rotation).

The insulation was softened by the heat and shorted out because the wires touched when I moved it - exit hard drive.

Thanks Grunt - I used a different site and it came up with '380W' thus the 'skimpy' bit.