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Hard drive intermittently disappears

C

CaptCanada

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 3, 2004
Messages
81
Hi all

I recently upgraded to a SamgSung EVO 250G SSD and have had some issues with my WD 1TB HDD that I am using for storage.

Occasionally, the WD drive will disappear from the file explorer list and I have to reboot my system to get Windows 10 to see it again.

I have the power settings changed so that Windows won't power down the drive at all but it still happens. It seem to happen after the system comes out out sleep mode.

Thanks for any help
 
Start by swapping the SATA cable out, and if that doesn't help then swap the SATA port that it is plugged into on the motherboard.
 
When you get it working back it up straight away in case it is a sign of failure.
Drive disappearing is typical of a drive thats about to snuff it completely.
 
I had this happen recently. It turned out that the SATA cable on the HDD was being bent by the case, causing it to disconnect. Replaced with a new 90 degree SATA cable (so there was no pressure) and it has worked fine since then.
 
Well, it's not the SATA cable or the SATA port, as I changed ports and getting the same result.

Not sure what's going on as this was my main storage drive before I upgraded to the Samsung EVO 850 SSD. I wonder if it's a BIOS setting, but that doesn't seem to make sense to me.

It's more of a hassle to have to restart the machine to get the drive to show up file explorer.
 
Its dieing.
Think of it as a warning before it completely disappears.
 
Yeah, probably best to backup anything important on that drive. It may not have long left.
 
Is your motherboard one of the recalled Intel boards from a few years back that had the bad SATA ports on the 6-series chipset?
 
777 said:
Is your motherboard one of the recalled Intel boards from a few years back that had the bad SATA ports on the 6-series chipset?
Click to expand...
Worth the mention.
Op, check if your motherboard is a P67 chipset or post the motherboard info here.

The P67 was recalled due to the Intel SATA controller degrading.
It was replaced for free with the P67a so its rare to find one, but some may have missed the discovery.
 
Does your WD 1TB HDD take a long time to start up in order for it to work properly? (for example, using a USB-SATA enclosure)

If it does take several seconds (more than 5) for Windows to recognize it, that's the problem.

When a computer wakes up from a Sleep state (but not Hibernate), BIOS quickly rescans the SATA bus and if the drive is not quite ready (doesn't respond in time because it is still in the middle of spinning up), it will automatically be disconnected.

I have this exact issue with my two 1.5TB drives that were essentially gutted from their USB enclosures and connected through SATA internally in my system. The only way I know to get around this is only use Hibernate, since it delays the system boot-up just enough so that the platter drives are already to go once the BIOS splash appears.
 
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