Internal hard drives keep disconnecting

[stev01988]

Hi all,

My current computer is about 5 years old with 3 internal hard drives: 1 SSD with the OS on it, and 2 HDDs used to store pretty much everything else (games, media, etc.) The 2 HDDs are:

Seagate ST3808110AS
Seagate ST3250140AS

Recently the HDDs have been disconnecting during use. Sometimes restarting the computer fixes it momentarily, and sometimes it just causes it to take forever for Windows to boot up and then the HDDs are still missing. At first I thought the problem was with faulty SATA cables, but switching them out didn't fix the problem.

The strange thing is connecting these two HDDs as external drives seem to work just fine... Even weirder is that connecting spare HDDs internally seems to work fine too. The problem just seems so sporadic that I'm not sure how to figure out what's causing it. Maybe the SATA slots on the motherboard? But the SSD works fine no matter which SATA port I plug it into....

Here are my specs from Speccy:

Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i5 3570K @ 3.40GHz 30 °C
Ivy Bridge 22nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 668MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8Z77-V PRO (LGA1155) 28 °C
Graphics
VA2323wm (1920x1080@60Hz)
2048MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 (ASUStek Computer Inc) 31 °C
Hard Drives
56GB OCZ-AGILITY3 (SSD) 30 °C

 

[CountMike]

Check advanced options in your Power plan and see if disks are set to sleep and after which time. I set mine to None.

 

[pnut10]

Check advanced options in your Power plan and see if disks are set to sleep and after which time. I set mine to None.

Holy crap I've been trying to figure this out forever. I've played around with SATA cables, power cables, motherboard ports. Everything. Thank you so much!

That's incredibly shortsighted that windows deactivates your drives by default. Who is Microsoft employing these days?

 

[CountMike]

It's been like that for long time and ever since XP. It's just a part of Power management. If you want, you can make own power plan with whatever settings available in it.