I have a very odd situation I could use some fresh perspectives on. I have a client that runs a machine shop. It's a small network: 7 workstations and 1 Windows 2008 server. The workstations are now all Dell OptiPlex 780's and the server is a PowerEdge R710. All the equipment is about 3 months old.
When my company took the account over, their workstations were going through hard drives like paper. Each and every week some hard drive would fail. The client was tired of their antiquated and unreliable equipment and that's when they decided to replace it all and we installed the Dell equipment mentioned above.
Everything ran just fine the way you would expect for a while. Now that they've had the new machines a couple months the workstations have developed the same exact symptoms. They will turn their system on and get "Drive 0 not found" errors. We come out, check everything over, and sure enough, the internal HD won't detect. The drives DO spin, but they no longer will detect. For the last month, they have had 1 (sometimes 2) HD failures per week. At this point, there is only 1 workstation out of the 7 that hasn't had a hard drive failure. So far the server has been running fine (crossing my fingers).
The onboard Dell diags report everything is fine (except hard drive not detected). If it wasn't for the fact that their previous equipment had the same symptoms, I would just assume Dell got a bad batch of hard drives. Including their old computer systems, I've now seen 13 workstations each with hard drive failures in the last 90 days.
The client had an electrician come out and install a completely isolated electrical circuit with power conditioning equipment, but that had no effect; the drive failures continue on a weekly basis. Most hard drives appear to last 1.5 to 2 weeks before failing.
Any clues as to what could be the cause? I've run out of ideas.
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Multiple systems, multiple hard drive failures.
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