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Computer crashed after plugging in external hard drive

I have an HP Desktop that I use for my home media server. I have one 500gb drive for Windows and a 6tb drive just for media storage. I added a bunch of movies to it and wanted to back it up. I plugged in my wd 3tb external and right away my computer becomes sluggish and unresponsive. I end up having to force restart. Usually during the boot process it shows my 2 hard drives. They are now coming up as not found. I reseated both drives and got it working. I tried the external drive again and same thing. Now reseating did not work a second time. Obviously my drive has crashed. But what are the odds that both drives would crash? I tried the external drive on a different computer and that worked fine. Both the 6tb drive and the external are less than 6 months old. Maybe just my 500gb drive crashesd? A few days we ago we had a really bad storm and the power was knocked out a total of 9 times. Annoyingly right when I would turn the computer back on it would go out again. Maybe that was the culprit? Anyways I can't see both drives failing at once. Maybe my board failed? Or let's say the 500gb drive failed would my 6tb not show up since it is just an installed drive for extra storage and doesn't have any OS on it?

Hp

Pegatron m2n78-la motherboard

AMD quad core 9750

8gb ram

Windows 7

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I would start by testing both drives. Download a free trial of HD Tune and check the health and run an error scan on each drive.

Yes, if there is a power surge it is possible that a controller can be damaged, especially if the system is not protected, or a cheap surge protector is used, but I would suspect a mechanical drive before thinking the controller is bad.

As far as drives go, we have received new drives that have tested good when installed into a system, and then fail a few days later. Mechanical drives can fail at any time no matter what brand they are. At our shop, we will never install a drive that is more then 2TB in a system, unless it is installed in a RAID configuration or a NAS box. The technology used in drives that are more then 2TB is really not reliable.

HD Tune Program: http://www.hdtune.com/

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