Question Hard Drive Disconnects Randomly

[Brother_Hood]

I have an HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L with four HDD bays. Thanks to a modded BIOS I use the onboard SATA port for the system drive that I nicely placed into the ODD bay. I also installed a four port SATA card and connected an additional 2.5" HDD for system backups. I'm running WHS 2011 and the server appears to be pretty stable. However in completely random intervals one of the hard drives disappears. It happened twice in two days, and didn't happen at all for several weeks after that. Sometimes it's enough to pull it out and put it back in again (hot-swap), and sometimes I have to do a reboot. The server runs 24/7, except for the rare occasion I have to do a hardware upgrade.

I have no idea what might be causing this. I noticed the first time around that it happened while I was writing to and reading from the drive at the same time. However it just happened again while either idle or very minor read operations being executed. My only idea is that it might be under-powered? The server has been modified and runs with an external 60W PSU. I believe the original internal one was twice as power-consuming (I still have it). I just wonder why it only happens to this drive then. It shows no signs of degradation (as reported by WHS and CrystalDiskInfo). It is a shucked WD white label drive. The others are all regular internal ones. I know about the 3.3V SATA pin issue, and that the drive wouldn't power up with certain PSUs. Since I didn't have to cover it with tape, I thought my PSU wasn't affected by it.

 

[win c 28]

it looks like the original power supply is 150W so the 60W power supply does seem like it could cause a power failure to one of the drives mainly when its on a heavy load when transfering stuff.... is there any error report or a event log indicating that a drive is going bad