P51 Killing HDDs

[jklop0712]

I have been trying add a secondary HDD to my ThinkPad P51 for a couple months now for backup purposes. My main drive is a 512GB SSD that came in the system. Since my computer did not ship with the HDD I had to buy the 4XB0L63274 kit so I could mount and connect the new drive. I did this and bought a 2TB Seagate FireCuda drive. This drive worked fine for a couple fo days till my computer started to fail too boot. (Note, the SSD was the boot drive.) After a couple days of this happening sporadically my computer completely failed too boot rather then it happening just sporadically and would hang up on the BIOS screen. 

Since I had depot warranty I brought it into the depot near where I go to college and had them look at it. Turns out the HDD I installed had failed causing it to hang up on the BIOS screen. Since the HDD was not in the computer when I bought it the service was not considered under warranty and I had to pay out of pocket. I understand that since my added HDD would not fall under the scope of what Lenovo's warranty would cover since it came from a third party.

I pursued a warranty claim with Seagate. To do this I need to once again pay out of pocket to return them the drive. I received a new drive free of charge less the shipping expense to Seagate. I installed this drive and it failed within a day of installation. I haven't returned the second drive even though I still have 4.5 years of warranty remaining.

I left it for a while because I got busy. Today I decided to try again. This time however, I went out and bought a WD Blue 2TB. Would have bought the WD Black but their 2TB WD Black model is 9.5mm thick, not 7mm so wouldn't fit. I installed it and I got about an hour of use out of it before it also failed. 

This leads me to believe that my THinkPad is killing the drives. When I install the drive, I remove the power cable and battery. After this I hold the power button for 30secs to make sure all power is drained from the system. FInally I proceed in installing the drive before attempting to boot up the system. This is definitely not my first attempt at adding a drive to a system. My dad is an IT so I basically grew up building and reconfiguring computers. I bought this computer to get me through my final year of mechanical engineering school and spending a couple hundred dollars to date on trying to add a drive I can't use hurts me as a student.

[jklop0712]

Something I forgot to mention. I do own the tools to connect to these drives through a USB connection and I can verify they are also dead and inaccessible when trying to connect that route.

[richk]

I have never heard of SATA drives being ruined as you describe.  At first, I thought it would be impossible, but I can imagine the voltage to the drive being wrong, either due to a bad power circuit or a defective cable.  As I said, I have never heard this happening.  As you bought it without the drives installed, I'm not sure whether Lenovo will check it out

[jklop0712]

That's what I was thinking could be possible as well. If I could prove that it was the power distribution to the drive or the cable somehow I think it would become Lenovo's problem because those are components they make so they should fall within their warranty and considered as a manufacturing defect. Having 3 drives from 2 different respectable brands fail back to back doesn't sound like a manufacturing defect on the drive manufacturers side.

Problem is that I can't think of anyway of doing this other then going to a service depot with a new drive and convincing them to hear me out on it and having another new drive fail there, probably at my expense. As I said before though, I'm a student so this is starting to cost me way more them I can afford to have paid for a secondary drive. Doing this would probably cost me another $100-$200 on what has already cost me a couple hundred dollars however it isn't right that something simple like this upgrade is costing me hundreds of dollars. I've got depot warranty till mid 2021 so I guess I have time to try to get this resolved.