Hard Drive Keeps Disppearing

pencea

pencea

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 21, 2016
Messages
74
One of my internal SATA hard drives ( 1TB Samsung 7200rpm ) keeps disappearing every time when I copy/transfer files to it. It also sometimes randomly disppears by itself too. In fact it actually just happened again as I was typing this....

Opening up disk management doesn't show the drive either.

The only way I can get the hard drive to show again is to reboot my PC. I've checked the health status of the drive with CrystalDiskInfo and it reports the drive is fine.

Does anyone know what could be the issue?
I'm using Windows 10 by the way my specs are in the sig.


When it happens I get this message.
 

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pencea said:
Thank you so much for this!

I’m an idiot. I’ve should’ve tried another cable before posting. Turns out it was indeed a bad cable. I’ve tested the drive with another cable and transferred/copy some large files. The drive doesn’t disappear anymore
Click to expand...

i went through the same headache as you recently, every few restarts one of my WD red 8TB drives would randomly disappear but showed up fine in the bios.. spent a week troubleshooting it so i finally gave in and replaced the sata cable even though i kept telling myself there was no way a brand new sata cable could be the issue and wallah, the drive quit disappearing.. pissed me off so much, lol.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
i went through the same headache as you recently, every few restarts one of my WD red 8TB drives would randomly disappear but showed up fine in the bios.. spent a week troubleshooting it so i finally gave in and replaced the sata cable even though i kept telling myself there was no way a brand new sata cable could be the issue and wallah, the drive quit disappearing.. pissed me off so much, lol.
Click to expand...

I know where you’re coming from. I had a hunch it could be the cable, but silly me keep trying to convince myself “nah it can’t be. Cables have never failed me before, so why now” I thought.

Instead I started to think the problem could either be the drive dying itself despite what CrystalDisk reports or something else but “besides the cable” was up xD

I’ve learned my lesson and will never overlook this simple solution again. :playful:
 
Glad to see this was resolved by the great community support. If anyone else stumbles on here with similar issues, a good first couple of steps for troubleshooting a hard drive are:

  1. Try a different cable
  2. Try a different port
  3. Try a different computer/device

Here is a resource on troubleshooting drives, we hope it can prove helpful to the community.
 
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