Secondary Hard Drive Randomly Doesn't Get Recognized

[mortey]

Hello all!

First time poster, long time lurker.

Just built a new computer and have a SSD as primary hard drive and a secondary Seagate ST2000DM001 Barracuda 7200RPM 2 TB SATA. The problem that I've had is periodically after a start up or restart the hard drive will not be recognized. It's not only not showing up in Windows Disk Management but also in Bios. Sometimes I will get lucky and after a restart it will be there, but not always. This morning I turned on the computer and saw in my computer the drive there but windows 7 was doing it's "refresh" thing in explorer where a progress bar moves at the top. Hard to explain but the drive wasn't showing any storage and when I tried to double click it, my computer froze!

I have it connected to the light blue sata connector on my Asus P8Z77-V Motherboard. I have tried changing to another Sata port with no success. I know they work because I previously had a blu ray drive connected to that port.

Is it just a faulty drive? Is there anything else I can do?

Thanks so much.

 

[canadian69]

Cable maybe.

 

[mortey]

Thanks for the tip! I switched to a different SATA cable and so far today it has been ok. I'll keep this thread updated if something changes.

 

[mortey]

Wow. Bad luck. 5 minutes after writing that the hard drive craps out again while in windows. I finished installing Firefox and opened it and it was freezing. It was installed on my SSD. Chrome was working fine (also installed on SSD) but then Windows Explorer came up with a notification to "end process" so I did and then my hard drive disappeared. I restarted and nothing showed up. Any ideas?

 

[canadian69]

What wattage power supply do you have installed and how many other drives are connected to it. (just throwing out some random ideas) maybe its a power issue causing these intermittent disconnects.

You may also want o post your question here if you haven't:
http://forums.seagate.com/

I quick searched it and didn't see anything specific, but there was mentions of firmware updates for some drives, you may want to look into that too. See what the Seagate engineers say as well. Also, do you have any other SATA drives, if so when pluged in as secondaries do they do the same thing?

 

[mortey]

Thanks for the great reply Canadian69!

My power supply is 650w which should be more than adequate. It is currently powering my 670 gtx without issue.

I posted the question on the Seagate forums per your suggestion. I will do that firmware when I get home from work and see if that works. Hopefully they know what's up. Is it possible it's a drive issue? Should it be replaced?

As for the other Sata drives, that's a great idea. I could give that a whirl. The problem is that I can't seem to reproduce this error so I wouldn't know what to look for. Seems like a very random issue I have.

Frustrating because I just built this computer on Friday and this is the only issue I'm having (fingers crossed!) with the entire build.

 

[canadian69]

I hear your frustration, it's like a constant state of being around here.

Yep, could be a drive issue. You could test the drive in another PC too and see what happens. All process of elimination really. I would probably look into RMA'ing the drive if it also does random disconnects in another PC or if the support guys at Seagate tell you to return it.

Intermittent faults are the hardest to resolve. We all welcome you to the board.

 

[mortey]

Well I switched out the hard drive with another one I have and it was working just fine. The problem drive was running fine on the other computer as well but that doesn't surprise me as it's completely random when it decides it doesn't want to work. Ran Seagate tools on the drive though and it failed Short DST. That was enough for me to decide to return it and get another. Hopefully that's the end of the issues. Will keep this thread updated with any and all developments.

 

[mortey]

Update:

Got a replacement hard drive, installed it, assigned a drive letter to it, and so far (fingers crossed!) it has worked without issue! Thanks so much for your help!

 

[mortey]

Best answer selected by mortey.