Hello all! I'm a relatively new PC builder and I increased my available storage on my pc with a brand spankin' new Seagate BarraCuda ST3000DM008 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive from Newegg. I've been having this reoccurring issue where my hard drive disappears after I've formatted it and installed games on it... My PC's OS is windows 10 with a Ryzen 3800X processor and Gigabyte X570 aorus pro wifi MB. I have the hard drive plugged into the same power cable splitter that two of my RGB fans run off of. My PSU is a 850W gold rated corsair.
After some research I found out there is a default windows setting that turns off drives after 20 mins and I assumed that's why it kept disappearing. I changed it to the 'Never' option, but this didn't turn it back on. So then I shut down my pc then turned it back on and still, no drive was visible in my folders. Out of curiosity, I went to disk management only to be greeted by a new drive discovery prompt labeling it as unallocated space and basically wanting me to format it again to be able to use it. It is getting super annoying to redownload games over and over, and I dont understand why I cant just turn it back on while the pc is running windows. I basically want to know why I'm having to reformat it every time I turn the PC back on and what vital points I'm missing in understanding how it works... because something is definitely fishy here. Shouldn't the drive spin back up with everything I've put on it like normal even though it powered down after 20 mins? If say, the power wire is loose and it loses power, would that force it to be reformatted again? I'm just racking my brain trying to understand what would make the drive forget it was formatted in the first place. I've yet to see if changing the default power down time to 'never' has fixed it... I have a feeling it may be something else.
After some research I found out there is a default windows setting that turns off drives after 20 mins and I assumed that's why it kept disappearing. I changed it to the 'Never' option, but this didn't turn it back on. So then I shut down my pc then turned it back on and still, no drive was visible in my folders. Out of curiosity, I went to disk management only to be greeted by a new drive discovery prompt labeling it as unallocated space and basically wanting me to format it again to be able to use it. It is getting super annoying to redownload games over and over, and I dont understand why I cant just turn it back on while the pc is running windows. I basically want to know why I'm having to reformat it every time I turn the PC back on and what vital points I'm missing in understanding how it works... because something is definitely fishy here. Shouldn't the drive spin back up with everything I've put on it like normal even though it powered down after 20 mins? If say, the power wire is loose and it loses power, would that force it to be reformatted again? I'm just racking my brain trying to understand what would make the drive forget it was formatted in the first place. I've yet to see if changing the default power down time to 'never' has fixed it... I have a feeling it may be something else.