Hard drive strange behavior

dexter98

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Oct 2, 2008
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I have this Western Digital WD15EARS 1.5TB drive which I bought for my HTPC. It is one of those green drives that have 5400 RPM and use less energy. I have no problem with the hard drive on my HTPC until I took it out and placed it on my system for storage.

Basically my system has 2 hard drives, a 320GB for Windows 7 and this 1.5TB for storage. I noticed for a couple days that when my system wasn't accessing the 1.5TB hard drive for a period of time, and then I tried to open the hard drive and it wouldn't respond for seconds. When I open My Computer, normally it would show "Local Disk (E:) 1.xxTB free of 1.36TB", but when the situation I described above occurs, it would only show "Local Disk (E:)", "1.xxTB free of 1.36TB" disappeared until seconds later when I could access the hard drive, then "1.xxTB free of 1.36TB reappears".

Is this normal? I never have a hard drive behave this way, is there a fix for this?
 

dexter98

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Oct 2, 2008
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18,530


Yes, I have the Windows 7 default, which is to turn off hard disk after 20 minutes. However, I am not sure if this is the cause of the issue. Like I said earlier, I have 2 hard disks in my system. A 320GB running Windows 7 and 1.5TB for storage. I never encountered this issue with 320GB, and I didn't have this problem either when 1.5TB was running Windows 7 on my HTPC. The issue started after I put it on my system as secondary storage.

Also, I have not been accessing the 1.5TB hard drive since my 1st post, which is way longer than 20 minutes and the issue hasn't reoccur yet, so I am not exactly sure what triggers this issue.