External hard drive not accessible with disk management and freezes after idle

[jcmusic525]

Hi, I am having trouble with my external hard drive. I have a 5TB external Seagate HD that is powered by an AC power plug, not USB powered. The problem occurs after I leave my computer for a few hours and come back, I won't be able to access any of the files or even open any folders on the hard drive when I try to click on its contents in Explorer. However, if I were to unplug the power cable and then reconnect it, it will work again. This is super annoying and I tried to download some hard drive maintenance software to see if that would work but none of them were able to detect my external hard drive although window's explorer detects it. Sometimes when I click into a folder or file on the external drive windows will pretty much get stuck and the little spinning busy ball keeps spinning until I either restart my computer or unplug the external drive. I've even tried disabling sleep/save power mode in all USB hosts in device manager and it still doesn't help. Any ideas what's going on? Thank you!

Processor: Intel Core i7-4790 CPU 3.60 GHz
Installed RAM: 16GB
Operating system: Win 10 64bit

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there jcmusic525,

The first thing you may want to do is to back up the data stored on it.

Have you tried the drive on a different USB port? See connecting it to the ones on the back of the computer case would make any difference. If the issue persists, then you can attach it to another computer, so you can be sure if there's something wrong with your system or the drive itself.

Is the drive under warranty? If the aforementioned things do not help, then I believe it may be a good idea to contact the place you got it from.
See if the drive would be detected by any of these: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[bazbazan]

Hello jcmusic525,

I think this problem is related to soft poweroff on the USB port when you leave your computer (for a few hours, as you said). Either drive hardware or its driver does not properly support soft poweroff on the USB port, so it is unable to recover from that state.

I suggest you to disable USB suspend in Control Panel applet called "Power Options", Advanced Tab:

 

[jcmusic525]

Hey thanks for responding! I will try a different USB port and if that fails I will also try to use it on another computer. The weird thing is my hard drive was totally fine just a week or so ago. It just suddenly out of nowhere started acting up this way!

Hi there jcmusic525,

The first thing you may want to do is to back up the data stored on it.

Have you tried the drive on a different USB port? See connecting it to the ones on the back of the computer case would make any difference. If the issue persists, then you can attach it to another computer, so you can be sure if there's something wrong with your system or the drive itself.

Is the drive under warranty? If the aforementioned things do not help, then I believe it may be a good idea to contact the place you got it from.
See if the drive would be detected by any of these: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[jcmusic525]

Thanks for replying! I will try this out right now. Hopefully this will solve the not responsive issue after being idle however it does not explain why I can't detect the external drive in any hard drive management software like Seagate Tools or any other 3rd party hard drive maintenance tool. I tried 3 different kinds and they all would not detect the external drive and would crash the program. However, explorer does read the hard drive and I am able to access the files when the drive does work and is not sleeping.

Hello jcmusic525,

I think this problem is related to soft poweroff on the USB port when you leave your computer (for a few hours, as you said). Either drive hardware or its driver does not properly support soft poweroff on the USB port, so it is unable to recover from that state.

I suggest you to disable USB suspend in Control Panel applet called "Power Options", Advanced Tab: