It could really just be the drives. Sometimes they just fail.
Indeed, this would definitely be the case if the drives had a poor SMART health test results to begin with.
Note: never run Core on a hard disk with failing SMART check results, even if it's just a degree or two above normal temperature.
Most (all?) systems will stop at POST / Boot when your drive is giving SMART errors with a warning and a press a key to continue message.
What a relief. It took a week of fiddling to rescue a bit of BTC that was stuck in an Armory wallet on Windows. Bitcoin Core has destroyed two of my hard drives (i.e. a Seagate Barracuda and a SanDisk Ultra SSD).
I know that some series of Seagate Barracuda hard drives showed high percentage of failures but it's not only related to Bitcoin Core and it happened even to regular users who used it for storing of data and surfing.
Important thing for hard drives is to do regular health checks from time to time, scan for errors and use trim option for SSD drives.
If same failure thing happened with your SSD drive than maybe you have issue with some different hardware component of your computer.
That was why I was thinking RAM, that the drives are not dying but bad RAM is causing corruption.
Most other things will show other issues in other places. That or something else on the I/O chain.
My guess is RAM.
It
could really just be the drives. Sometimes they just fail.
Another possibility would be the SATA cable.
I would think that at that point even the 3rd drive would be giving errors / have issues.
-Dave
