Question Drive back after disappearing for weeks

[je1983]

So about three months ago, I bought a WD 4tb drive (4tb WD40ezrz)as a backup which worked for about three weeks and disappeared from My Computer menu. I tried it on an external hub and it worked fine. Then I put it back in my pc where it was fine for about a month, then my pc started to crash, no bsod, just stop and freeze and become unresponsive. This happened maybe two or three times, I suspect it had something to do with the drive because shortly after, I would start my pc and the drive would disappear after a few minutes from restarting.

For the past month I have been too busy to deal with it and have not touched it, it has remained connected but my pc has not been able to detect it. My pc has frozen twice in the past week and the third time, it became visible again. I thought it would disappear like it has done before but to my surprise, it has been detectable all day and I have even been able to transfer a total of 600+gb from it to my new backup drive.

Just based on my description of events, does it sound like a faulty drive, sata cable, port or psu?

 

[Ralston18]

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS.

My thought would be power/PSU....

You mentioned "external hub" - is the drive cased in USB housing and the external hub an independently powered USB hub?

Look in Reliability History for error codes and warnings related to the drive.

 

[je1983]

Thanks.

My external hub is independently powered but connected via usb 2.0 to my pc.

I'm on a windows 10 home premium, Asus bm150m-a, 16gb ram, Asus wifi card, no gpu, neo eco 400w psu (I bought this pc in 2016 but used the psu form a 2014 computer), running four internal drives and a cd rom. The new 4tb drive was a replacement for a smaller one, which had worked without issue prior to exchanging. After the first time it disconnected, I was able to connect it via external drive and ran an error test using hdtune as well as WDtools and the seagate tool with no issues. I also ran error scans after putting it back in to my pc, connected to Sata ports.

The first couple of times when the drive would first disconnect, I would check event viewer and the only issue was iaStorA “Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0 , that I could find around the time of the disconnect. Later on when my pc started to freeze up and hang there was no event around the time. I do frequentl get DCHP errors and Volsnap (shadow copies of Volume C: were aborted...), here and there.


I'm also wondering if it's a PSU issue, but if it is, could it be possible that it's only affecting one particular drive? I just want to rule out that it's the drive itself. It seems rather unusual for a failed drive to behave in this manner, disconnecting and reconnecting and now seemingly working fine.