Question Missing HDD causes Windows 10 to lag

[Simon Christiansen]

Symptoms:

• Internal HDD sporadically go missing from Windows file explorer after computer has been turned on for a while (minimum 1 day of uptime it seems)
• Also, services that rely on this drive stop working. The only services that uses this drive is: Nvidia Shadowplay and Google Backup & Sync
• When that happens, everything (input and output such as mouse/keyboard, video and audio) lags sort of how a lag spike occurs. It is very regular, with 3 seconds a part each time.

Immediate solution:

• A normal restart doesn't work. But turning the computer completely off, draining residual power, and then turning it back on works each time

I've tried reconnecting the SATA cable to make sure its properly connected. I'm confident it is.
I have a 850W power supply powering a GTX 1080 Ti GPU. There is one other SSHD. Two SSD's and one NVME drive. I think the power supply should be enough for all of this.

Also, one thing that might be somewhat relevant is that I've only experienced this occuring whenever I leave GTA V running for longer periods of time. I just think it's wierd if that would cause this, considering a simple restart isn't enough to reconnect the drive.

I would also add that this started happening after I once reinstalled Windows 10 (full format on all drives)
That was 4 months ago.

My immediate hypothesis is that the lag is caused by Windows 10 or some of the services I mentioned are trying to look for the drive maybe?
But the cause of the HDD disappearing, I have no idea of.
I found out I had "Turn off HDD after 20 minutes" active on the power plan. Changed that to "Never", and thought I had fixed it. To my surprise, it is still going on.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Check health of your HDD. Use HDtune health. Post screenshot.

 

[Ralston18]

Look in Event Viewer and Reliability History/Manager.

Either one or both may be logging some event that is causing the HDD to disappear.

Look for a date and time that you know the computer was started. Read ahead through the logs to the 24 hour ( 1 day mark) to look for such logged events.

When the HDD "disappears" the overall system lags because there is some app or apps looking for it.

You can look in Task Manager to see if something is launching in the background that is related to either the HDD "dissappearing" or otherwise impacting drive activities. Resource Monitor will do much the same.