Question PC crashes, then my primary hard drive disappeared for hours. Then reappeared after a few reboots?

[Swervingwall5]

So a long story short, I was converting video footage overnight (using Handbrake) and come morning I discover that the conversion was way slower than usual. Suddenly, windows explorer and every application I have open crashes. After rebooting, the computer takes it's sweet time on the loading bios screen (which usually only takes 10-15 seconds. This was about a minute or a minute and a half) until I'm finally on the desktop. Everything on my desktop has the paper icons, and said "location not found" or some sort of error like that. And the file explorer was only recognizing my other two hard drives.

Fast forward a few hours later, I try again. This time I check the bios, and in terms of boot options I only saw the two hard drives I saw earlier. I rebooted the pc one last time, and then everything's back?

As a bit of a background, I have 3 hard drives altogether. 1 primary SSD for windows boots, (1) 1 tb hard drive used to store all my games, and (1) 2 tb hard drive that's used for everything... which is the one that's recently been acting up. I'm afraid this is a sign of a failing drive. I checked the drive status using cmd, which "claims" everything is okay, but I have my suspicions. What could be the problem?

 

[CountMike]

Did your run health tests on that apparently failing drive ?

 

[cryoburner]

If you have anything valuable on that drive that's not already backed up, it might be a good idea to make a copy of those files to your other drives, in case it ends up failing. Things like games can typically be reinstalled rather easily if you need to free up space on another drive, but data files may not be so easily replaceable.

 

[Swervingwall5]

Did your run health tests on that apparently failing drive ?

Yes, and it said "Ok" three times. I'm assuming the three "Ok's" meant it checked all three of my drives.

 

[Swervingwall5]

If you have anything valuable on that drive that's not already backed up, it might be a good idea to make a copy of those files to your other drives, in case it ends up failing. Things like games can typically be reinstalled rather easily if you need to free up space on another drive, but data files may not be so easily replaceable.

I'm in the process of completing an online backup now for my data. I'm also hoping this couldn't be a problem related to any other components like the ram?