External USB Drives Disconnect and Reconnect Repeatedly and Randomly

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[Susan Bradley]

I run backups to two large USB external HDDs.  One is a Seagate 12TB and the other is a Seagate 8TB, both USB 3.  Recently, one or both has begun to randomly disconnect and reconnect for no apparent reason.  Sometimes when a backup is in progress, sometimes when the drive is sitting idle.  I also noticed when looking at Device Manager, that it repeatedly resets itself, even when I am trying to look for issues with USB drivers.  I have tried:

1. Reinstalling USB drivers
2. Reconfiguring power management settings for USB to not allow PC to turn off power to the USB devices to save power.
3. Disabling USB Selective Suspend settings
4. Changing BIOS USB settings to only recognize the two drives as HDDs.

Nothing has worked.  I am running Windows 10 Pro 22H2 on a ASUS Z790-Plus with an Intel 17-13700K, 32GB RAM, RTX3090.

Any ideas would be most welcome!

• This topic was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Susan Bradley.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Just another Forum Poster.

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Changed the cable?

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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I thought about that, but it happens with both drives on different cables and USB ports.  One thing I am going to try is putting a fan on the HDDs.  Perhaps they are overheating…

I also tried rebooting the computer with both drives off.  Their power supplies are plugged into a controllable smart hub so I can turn them on and off.  I never do that without ejecting them first by the way.  I understand that Windows is smarter about removing USB devices, but I don’t trust it.

I will try different cables and see what happens!

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I’ve run into the same problem and “usually” changing USB ports works… although I do have one particular USB drive that always does this if plugged into a particular port!

Strange thing is, it works just fine in any other port and my other drives work just fine in that specific port so it’s obviously something about that particular USB drive (which is a 512GB PNY.)

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PNY brand usb flash drives are sometimes not reliable as I used to have a PNY 16Gb usb drive several years ago that eventually died and was no longer recognized by any desktop or laptop PC, regardless of which usb port I inserted it in

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To close out this thread:  I bought a powered, switchable USB hub and checked and reconnected all the cables.  That seemed to fix the problem.  No random disconnects since.

Now, if someone would just come up with a way to eject the external drives on a schedule  . . .

Thanks for the help!

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geekdom

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Dave,

Here’s a short 2 line PowerShell program to do the trick.

# Author: Savchenko Dmitriy on SuperUser.com
$driveEject = New-Object -comObject Shell.Application
$driveEject.Namespace(17).ParseName("E:").InvokeVerb("Eject")

Yeah, OK 3 lines but I didn’t write it so the comment with attribution.

Just copy the code into a file and name it Eject-USB.ps1. Then create a Scheduled task to run the program and set a schedule for the ejection.

Don’t forget to change the drive letter to match your setup. BTW I’d suggest the free USBDLM program to make sure your usb drives are always connected to the same drive letter.

UPDATE: This program will NOT eject USB drives with multiple drive letters!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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