Problem with Win 8 check disk on external drives

masai

Honorable
Sep 30, 2014
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10,510
Hello everyone.
I have a Lenovo Laptop with Windows 8 and Probox 4-bay enclosure with 4 hard drives.
These are the drives in order from top to bottom:
1. WD red 2tb
2. WD Green 2tb (old sata II)
3. WD Green 2tb (newer sata III)
4. Seagate 2.5" 1tb (was originally in the laptop, substituted with a Samsung 840 EVO 120gb)
The enclosure is connected to the laptop with USB 3.0

Everything was working fine for the passes year, apart from the fact that sometimes when I tuned on the enclosure one drive was not showing up.
A while ago, windows asked me to check and fix the drive #3 when I turned them on and so I did, but it kept asking me that every time I turned the enclosure on, until I realized an entire folder disappeared because of the check disk. After searching, googling and trying recover software I found the files under the Folder.0001 due to check disk. I was able to recover all the files simply going into a sub folder of Folder.0001 because explorer wouldn't want to go directly to that folder.

Anyway after all of this I backed up my files, I run surface testes and all my drives are perfectly healthy, no SMART warnings. Still, every time I turn the enclosure on, windows wants to run check disk on both #1 and #3 and only once on #4.
I tried disabling windows check disk following
this guide, the Shell Hardware Detection is disabled and not running, but I still get asket to run check disk. It's annoying and if it get's clicked by mistake, I might loose some files.

What's your advice on how to handle this?

Thanks.
 
Solution
It is concerning to have the "Green" drives in an enclosure - especially if you are utilizing JBOD on the drives....Green drives "power down" and can create issues when utilized in some of these systems. I am not sure if that is what is causing your headaches....but it might be contributing to them.

There is a linux utility that will disabled the green features: http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

WD's website had a bunch of downloads depending upon the model of the drive you have.
It is concerning to have the "Green" drives in an enclosure - especially if you are utilizing JBOD on the drives....Green drives "power down" and can create issues when utilized in some of these systems. I am not sure if that is what is causing your headaches....but it might be contributing to them.

There is a linux utility that will disabled the green features: http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

WD's website had a bunch of downloads depending upon the model of the drive you have.
 
Solution
Hi there masai,

After the chkdsk appears, my guess is that there is something wrong either with the drives or the enclosure.

Even though you have already tested the drives, I would advise you to run the extended test of WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic. I would advise you to test one drive at a time(first back up the data and then check it). As your data will be backed up, you can even run chkdsk.
If it turns out that there is nothing wrong with the drives, you should consider your enclosure being the cause of the issue you are facing. Try putting the drives in another enclosure or at least some of them as see if the problem persists.
I doubt that what ronintexas mentioned is related to this issue. The thing with the WD Greens is that they park the head more frequently due to their power saving characteristics. With WDIDDLE3 you can increase the time before the head is parked, though I don't think that this will help you out.

WD DLG tool: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=810&lang=en

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD