Hello, I've been having trouble with my hard drive for a little over a month that I can't seem to figure out. I've looked up all sorts of forum posts and tried trouble shooting it myself but the problem doesn't seem to be a simple one.
My C drive is an ssd with Windows 10 installed on it. The drive I'm having problems with is my M: Media drive. It's a Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB drive model: WD2002FAEX. I use the drive for media (big surprise), mostly Steam games and video recording. I've had the drive since April 2013 and up until recently I never had any problems with it.
The problem first popped up around September 17. Mad Max was 75% off on Steam and since I'd never played it and it seemed fun I figured I might as well get it. I started the download and started playing some Overwatch with my friends. At the match end screen I saw that none of the assets had loaded, and none of the menu options were working. I didn't have any problems in game, but I'm assuming that was all still saved/loaded in RAM. I tried to restart the game but I got a popup saying my shortcut target was missing. Looking in file explorer I saw that my M drive was missing and I was worried that it might have completely died on me.
I tried restarting my computer and there it was, like nothing happened. I then ran a Windows error check, short, and extended S.M.A.R.T. tests which all came back fine. I started up the Mad Max download on Steam again and a few minutes later my M drive was gone again. The same thing happened when I tried to update Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. After testing it, it seemed like writing to any larger game file was causing the problem. Downloading/updating small games didn't seem to cause the drive to disappear. Also if my computer goes into hibernation the drive is almost always gone when I wake it up, with or without Steam running.
The problem seemed to be gone for a while, but it happened again today. I'm guessing it was from Steam auto downloading a game update, unfortunately I wasn't at my computer when it happened so I can't be sure.
Luckily the drive is still under warranty so I can get it replaced if I need to but I want to be sure it's worth the time/effort to do so and not some simple fix that I've overlooked. If you need any information about my system to help try to diagnose the problem let me know and I will post it as soon as I can.
My C drive is an ssd with Windows 10 installed on it. The drive I'm having problems with is my M: Media drive. It's a Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB drive model: WD2002FAEX. I use the drive for media (big surprise), mostly Steam games and video recording. I've had the drive since April 2013 and up until recently I never had any problems with it.
The problem first popped up around September 17. Mad Max was 75% off on Steam and since I'd never played it and it seemed fun I figured I might as well get it. I started the download and started playing some Overwatch with my friends. At the match end screen I saw that none of the assets had loaded, and none of the menu options were working. I didn't have any problems in game, but I'm assuming that was all still saved/loaded in RAM. I tried to restart the game but I got a popup saying my shortcut target was missing. Looking in file explorer I saw that my M drive was missing and I was worried that it might have completely died on me.
I tried restarting my computer and there it was, like nothing happened. I then ran a Windows error check, short, and extended S.M.A.R.T. tests which all came back fine. I started up the Mad Max download on Steam again and a few minutes later my M drive was gone again. The same thing happened when I tried to update Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. After testing it, it seemed like writing to any larger game file was causing the problem. Downloading/updating small games didn't seem to cause the drive to disappear. Also if my computer goes into hibernation the drive is almost always gone when I wake it up, with or without Steam running.
The problem seemed to be gone for a while, but it happened again today. I'm guessing it was from Steam auto downloading a game update, unfortunately I wasn't at my computer when it happened so I can't be sure.
Luckily the drive is still under warranty so I can get it replaced if I need to but I want to be sure it's worth the time/effort to do so and not some simple fix that I've overlooked. If you need any information about my system to help try to diagnose the problem let me know and I will post it as soon as I can.
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