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Hard Drive Vanishes...and reappears.
MegaMan001
CRNARochester, MNRegistered User regular
CRNARochester, MNRegistered User regular
Turned on the desktop this morning, and my 
was just gone. Rebooted, it's back.
Early sign this is dying and should get my backups going?
was just gone. Rebooted, it's back.Early sign this is dying and should get my backups going?
I am in the business of saving lives.
+1
Posts
There’s an old tool called spin right that I have used that worked pretty good getting some extra life out of old drives. There’s probably new and better software out there.
I’m slightly disappointed this isn’t about a magic trick where you make hard drives disappear.
*I Have a pretty new 8 TB drive that after a few months started dropping out within an hour or two after boot. Since I am running this on a 10 year old Core i7 machine, and the rig is going to be replaced, I could not really be bothered to start bug hunting. Instead the drive is now connected through an external SATA-USB3 gizmo without any issues, something which does indicate that either the old motherboard is not really able to deal with a 8TB or the motherboard is dying.
Platter drives (which I assume that is) will fail like zepherin said either very quickly, or after about half a decade.
Man, the screen to my laptop just snapped off and now this. Bad time for computers in this house.
It could very well be a PSU on the fritz too, both are roughly the same amount dollar wise to replace unless you've got a SSD. Cheap capacitors (like those you find in store bought PCs) lose their ability to hold a charge over time and eventually they can no longer hold enough charge to provide power to certain devices, first ones to go are the 5v rails that power SATA and such.
A long shot, but you could also try replacing the SATA cable itself. I've yet to see a SATA cable die, so that would be your final move before pulling the drive and putting it into an external enclosure, as hinted above.
FWIW, you can get a USB-3 to SATA power and data cable for under $10 US which is quite useful for stuff like drive cloning, copying data, or running various checkouts. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011M8YACM/
(People: note you can delete all the "ref=" mumbo jumbo from your Amazon links!)
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/
Everything is in the blue or good on both of those monitors.
Total on time is 13,842 hours which...jeez I need another hobby.
LOL - That made me wonder so I just did a check on my main rig.
17354 hours, 38409 hours, 26228 hours and 2287 hours(that is my relatively new 8 TB drive). On the rig I have also a few older SSD drives that was once doing work in a 24/7 server I have, the numbers for them is 43603 hours, 59546 hours and 52009 hours.
All drives are given a green light, except the 38409 hour one which is marked yellow due to the Reallocated Sector Count being 199 and the Current Pending Sector Count at 200. Since it is a 1.5 TB which was once the C-drive of the machine, the big number does not surprise me - it is a 10 year old rig. The power on count is 3535!
I too need another hobby (or rather I need to work less from home).
Still my main point here is merely that hard drives including SSD's can work fine for a very long time.
I had a secondary HDD go missing on boot because a USB device was plugged in halfway. I guess something on the board controller went haywire.
In my case it was an xbox 360 controller, and all through the kind of testing you're doing now I never noticed that it was blinking for a long time before continuing to Win10.
When I put it in correctly, it came right back and functioned for 2 years.
And then died quickly, back up your data
No shit that's...timely because some of my USB ports have been acting super weird lately.