External Harddrives Keep Randomly Disconnecting

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davidrosen

davidrosen

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Aug 17, 2013
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This is sort of a continuation of this thread I started here: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2656742/external-harddrive-failing.html#15926473

But since I have a lot more to add, I figured I should start a new thread.

So I (it's actually my girlfriend's but I'll act like it's mine for the ease of explanation), have a Dell XPS 8700 running Windows 8.1. It has 6 USB3.0 ports. I have 3 external harddrives, two are seagate and 1 is western digital. All three use USB 3.0.

The Western Digital drive is fine. It stays connected 100% of the time. Never an issue. BOTH Seagate drives will randomly... maybe after a few hours after plugging them in, maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks (usually much sooner than that), they just disappear from explorer. If I unplug them (in the attempt to replug them in), it will sometimes make the noise Windows makes when you disconnect a USB device (but sometimes not), and when you plug it back in, it will make the noise it makes when you connect a USB device (but sometimes not). Regardless, the drive doesn't appear again.

The only way to make the computer see these two drives is to reboot. Once I reboot, all is good again until it's not.

In troubleshooting, I have swapped the drives around to different USB3.0 ports for a couple weeks at a time, and the issue continues, only with the Seagate brand drives. I have also tried the drives on a different computer, and while I tried one for an extended period of time and had no issues, I've only had a chance to try the other for a short period of time, but still, no issues.

It is pretty clear to me that this must be a software issue, am i right? Something between the Seagate drives and Windows 8.1 and/or my motherboard/system. So, short of reformatting my computer... Any ideas what more I could do? I was thinking about removing the USB devices from Device Manager so the drivers would reinstall, but there's no way to know which entries in Device Manager are those specific USB3.0 ports. Or is there? I'm all up to date as far as Windows Update and Dell's own update software say. And I manually updated the BIOS in an effort to fix this but that hasn't helped either.

Any ideas? Much appreciated.

Thanks.
 
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secondly is your laptop power always on for the USB drives? you can change how long the power stays on for usb drives in the device manage, under the usb settings, must set to always on or maximum, or they will shut stuff off to save power, eg hard drives and wireless connections. it could happen to the seagates and not the WD cause the seagate might not send the same signal to "stay on" as the WD does...
 
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Are the Seagate drives "green"? Some of the green technology drives - especially external drives, have issues with the computer and/or external drives going to "sleep". The signal isn't processed properly by the operating system. It can be exacerbated by having multiple make/model drives.

I would also make sure that your USB drivers are fully up to date - there are issues with USB 3 drivers in many cases....
 
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Thanks guys. So in response to your questions...

1) Firmware is up to date on one of the drives. The other one it says there's a firmware update but only for use with Mac OSX. So not sure about that one...

2) This is a desktop, not a laptop, however I have gone into power options and turned off pretty much anything that would indicate it's going to turn off hard discs or usb devices to conserve power. Power Options - Advanced Settings, there's some drop downs... One of them is Turn off Hard Discs after, and I set it to Never. I think there was a setting under USB that I turned off too. and in general my power options are turn off monitor after 5 hours, computer after Never.

3) I am not sure if they are green. They are two different models of Seagate Backup Plus (both just show up with that name, not a specific model number... I could get down there and turn them over to find specific models if needed, but both are Backup Plus).

4) Updating USB Drivers... How exactly? I went into Device Manager and for every item under Universal Serial Bus Adapters, I double clicked, went to driver, and went to update driver, but none of them had available updates. Is that the only way to go about updating the USB driver?

 
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http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/xps-8700/drivers

under modems and comunications

download this : this is not a "windows update driver" this is the proper driver for you usb3 ports, the windows one is just generic.

Intel 7260 Bluetooth Driver View details
XPS-8700_Communications_Driver_32KKW_WN_3.1.1307_A00.EXE | Update Package for Microsoft® Windows® (37 MB)
Modem/Communications
|
Release date 17 Oct 2013
|
Last Updated 08 Jul 2014
|
Recommended
Version 3.1.1307,A00
This file will automatically self-install after downloading.
Restart required
 
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ok so i have a rather radical solution...

take the seagate HDDs out of the case and you will then have reaguler HDD's which you can then install into you system.
SAMSUNG Spinpoint s to be exact. reagular good old sata..

they will be faster, they will not fail !

you have 5
SATA conectors on your board and im sure they are not full so you can install them like any old HDD,
if anything im thinking the USB module in the seagats is failing not the hardrives themselves.

how to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6eV3pEXKgo
same for the bigger sizes if you got the big one.
 
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Haha I appreciate the idea but no, it's supposed to be an external haha. We may be adding in an extra internal or two anyway soon because her photography career takes up SO much space, it's ridiculous. But these were purchased to be external and I want to get them working as external drives...

Anyone else have any possible suggestion? Other than temporarily backup these drives to my other computer's internal storage and then burn these drives and sell the ashes to buy Western Digital Externals and never buy Seagate again ;-)
 
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Also just wanted to add, I was thinking the seagate drive or connector was failing too, but first of all, one of these two drives is new enough that i was able to get a warranty replacement on the whole thing, and even the new replacement is having issues... so it's definitely not the drive... it's gotta be something in software i believe... but something that only affects seagate drives (or maybe more than just seagate, but not he western digital)... arrgh...
 
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Yea, I think I mentioned up above somewhere that I've tried them on my own computer, at least for a short period of time (few days) and they never disconnected. On hers though, it can disconnect within a few hours sometimes. The amount of time is totally random.
 
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just tried e-mailing this thread to seagate, because one of the drives is under warranty (although they've already replaced it once and it didn't fix the issue so replacing it isn't going to help). we'll see if anything said here gives any further incite. thanks. and if anyone else thinks of anything, it's much appreciated 🙂
 
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One thing that may be of concern - the combination of the 3 drives may be creating too much power draw from the computer. A lot of the small external drives that don't have power adapters take 100% of their power via the USB bus....you might need to consider a powered USB hub to make sure the computer can properly power the drives....
 
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That's an interesting thought, yea. I'll mention that to the people at Seagte too, see if they think that's a possiblity. So that would just hook into one of my USB3.0 ports AND the wall for power? Is that how that would work?
 
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