Maybe it's the cia harassing you.

Check voltages on your power supply rails especially 12V and 5V at the molex's to your drives. better yet, run a wire outside the case and use alligator clips or something to a DMM while you have the machine running. Does it spike? Does it sag?

This is a very strange situation but it is possible you have old hardware that is somehow killing the drive. I doubt it would be data cable related as that should only cause errors in data transmission and disk corruption on drive, which should be easy to fix by reformatting or repairing the file system.

Maybe there is a short somewhere ? Check for countinuity on the motherboard.

Its possessed by ghost of previous owner.

Maybe the IDE controller is killing them. That's really the only thing left that I can tell.

candle_86 wrote:

running into an at to atx adapter

Could there be a problem with this adapter?

I checked the case and board, its seated on standoffs properly, but i isolated with felt washers top and bottom of screw holes

its really weird, it did fine for 9 months then suddenly this started.

Power supply might be going bad. Check the voltages on the 12 and 5 volt rails, and then try with a known-good different power supply.

The drives revving up, then stopping sounds like they're receiving too much power, and killing the motor for the platters or the r/w heads.

Think I found my culprit, for the cables to reach I was using a molex splitter, the wire for 5v just broke, like it was bent to many times. I noticed because the 5v is droopy and has no resistance to bending inside it's insulation.

Could a broken wire internally do this?

It's Friday, I replaced the y splitter and tried again, so far hard drive is working normally