Overclock suddenly unstable?

Well i've been running my rig oc'd to 3GHz for... oooh... 9 months? on stock voltage.

So I got some spam email as per usual from a company called Maplin, they do electrical components and stuff. Anyway they're doing this amazing offer on a 500GB USB External HDD for £70 so I went out and brought me one. It's awesome btw.

I got home, plugged it in, it works great.

Next morning, I boot my pc and just as it gets to my boot loader it reboots and resets my bios as if it attempted to boot and it wasn't stable, so the mobo reset to settings that definately work. I thought "hmm it's early - maybe i'm seeing things." - ramped my OC back up and carried on as normal, all was good. Stable as ever.

This morning, day 2, I booted and EXACTLY the same thing happened again. Had to ramp my OC back up again.

So what do you guys reckon? External HDD being sh1tty, or suddenly my OC is unstable?

 

Recently a lot of my freinds and family have been having trouble with External USB HDD's. From what I can figure the problems have something to do with the windows "Safely Remove Hardware" feature (best to disable), and the fact that most of these USB drives have firmware installed for USB 2.0, and little if any USB 1.0 support.(Some motherboards have both 1.0 and 2.0 support but the connectors are connected to the 1.0 or sometimes one connector to one and the other to the other-LOL); it helps to know which one is which. Also if you delete the firmware/software that comes factory installed on the External HDD it causes nothing but problems. Have also had issues with PSU's in reguards to powering the USB 2.0 ports with these drives, I assume due to a higher draw for a longer period, than a "Flash" drive for example. (also some motherboards handle this better than others)

All in all, I'm not to happy with the current Extenal USB drives on older systems.

 

Usb connections make some boards unstable

 

This about sums it up. I remember having to unplug all my usb devices just to reinstall XP on another MB a while back. If your uSB HDD is 2.0 make sure you are using USB2.0 in the bios. Also, make sure you have the latest chipset drivers. They usually contain the latest info on usb driver support.

 

unplug it see if the problem goes away.. u can unplug to boot then plug in back in when u want to use it.. usb is hot swappable..

trog

 

Yeah, if it's unplugged it boots fine with my OC, rock solid.

A bit weird but I guess i'll have to live with it XD

 

possible, i know if i dissable "legacy USB" in my BIOS i can clock higher and be more stable

but i need to use my wingman rumblepad