Can OCing (even a little) damage hard drives?

[KenR7A]

Ive always OCed my FSB 5mhz to clear up some timing issues with the memory and my abit motherboard (known issue). Recently one of my hard drives started giving SMART errors.

Im wondering if OCing like that can cause issues with hard drives. This is because my other drive (after updating BIOS and reformatting) started acting up when the FSB was put back to 138.. Im back down to 133MHz and all is ok. Theyre both Maxtor D740x's on an HPT372 onboard RAID controller.

[s4]

I can't answer that question, but will suggest you get a good hard drive cooler if you want to prolong the life of your hard drive. Heat as much as anything can shorten it's functionality.

[flat-v8]

I know some HDD's dont like higher than normal buss speeds, and will create errors. Most newer drives have no problems with a PCI buss at around 36-40 mhz. Not sure about Maxtor, and it might be your Raid controller that doesn't like it.

[venom650_19]

Just a couple days ago, I was messing around with overclocking my machine. I successfully overclocked it to 1750MHz, with an FSB of 146. I ran 3DMark2001SE for about 2 hours to test it and it ran perfectly stable. I HAD a RAID 0 array, and when I turned my computer back on the next morning, it came up with a message saying one of the HDD in the array has failed. I had to delete the array, fdisk the remaining HDD, reformat it, and then do a fresh install of Windows. I'm now down to one 20GB Maxtor HDD at the moment.

I am pretty sure this is due to the overclocking, it was fine before I did any of that. It just didnt like the higher FSB. I've had both of these drives for about over 2 years now, and they've been through about 70 or more reformats and different FSB's. I learned to build a computer off of these two HDD, and besides the floppy drive they are the only things that have not been changed since my original computer I built 2 years ago.

Hard Drives can take a lot of abuse. I just would recommend against using a RAID array if your going to be doing any overclocking. I am no longer going to be using one. I'm also going to be purchasing a new HDD before I do an overclocking because I know this Maxtor driver wont last too long at the aforementioned FSB.

Good Luck!