thebratprince001

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Nov 8, 2007
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I've recently been experiencing some drive issues. At first I assumed it was my dual bay enclosure going bad and rebooting my drives at random intervals. It was getting worse so I bought a new enclosure and it's still happening. One drive will boot fully allowing me to view the files half the time while other times just the folders which will appear to be empty. The second windows says needs to be formatted to be used and then suddenly both will disappear and reappear as if they were just initialized. I had 2 dual bay enclosures sitting side by side and both plugged into the same strip so I'm not understanding why this is happening to just the one set of drives and what exactly is even going on.

should i just write off all my data and format the drives, a settings change or program that can fix it or are they both toast?

oh and both are western digital. one 1 TB and the other 500 GB and both only about a year old.
 

thebratprince001

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Nov 8, 2007
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oh one bit of info i just found. if i take out the smaller 500gb that keeps insisting on being formatted the larger drive that generally gets recognized remains running. possibly the smaller drive is causing the whole enclosure to suffer? i don't know enough about drive failure to do more than speculate because failure has been terribly rare among my drives over the last decade. i tend to outgrow them before they go bad.
 

thebratprince001

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Nov 8, 2007
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The settings are on Single JOB by default because i won't use BIG mode. It's not the enclosure because both drives had been in the enclosure for a year and when placed into a new enclosure the exact same thing is happening. When the larger 1TB drive is in the enclosure alone it works fine and when the 500gb is in the enclosure alone I just get told to format. When both are reinserted I get the smaller still insisting on formatting and the bigger starting up normally and then suddenly both are going down. I'm guessing I just have a bad drive without the more common "click" noise. At least it was the smallest of the 4 external drives right? lol