Can a PSU outage cause a Mechanical Start Failure on a S.M.A.R.T. drive?

Question

Recently, my PSU crunched out on me and I had to replace it. The drive in question was running at the time, and during an attempt at start up afterwards (during which the PSU did not output enough power to start all hardware, and peripherals were randomly shutting off).

Now that I've replaced the PSU with a newer and better model, I have done a S.M.A.R.T. check on all four of my hard drives, along with a few other hardware health checks, just to ensure that nothing else is going to die on me any time soon. I did this with GSmartControl.

All four drives passed the short check. However, my Hitachi has reported two Mechanical Startup Failure events, and highlighted that entry in red. I only have the vaguest idea of what this means, but I highlight that it did pass the self-test.

Should I be concerned? How can I find out when these events occurred? And, moreover, could they have happened during the PSU outage?

Thanks for the advice.

Answer 1

Yes, a blown PSU can damage your motherboard and any device connected to it. It is possible that it caused the Mechanical Start Failures. However, it is entirely possible they existed before, or came after the event. SMART simply records the number of these events, it does not tell you when they occurred. Getting this error is not an indication that drive is failing, as it could come from a variety of events.

Check the drives SMART status over the next few days and then maybe once a week for a few weeks. If the counter doesnt grow, you should be fine. If the counter does increase, then it would appear that your drive is more likely going to fail.

Obviously, if the data on the drive is important, back it up util you feel that the drive is working correctly.