Why does my archive drive periodically die?

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I recently lost one of my hard drives. That is, it started reading/writing certain files very slowly, and eventually Windows 7 couldn’t find it at all (a friend’s Windows 10 PC had no trouble finding it, but the slow copying persisted).

Thing is, I’ve lost a drive in this position/role on my system before.  In fact, that’s the only two hard drives I’ve ever had to discard.

My theory is that these drives are spending too much time idling.  Because I basically use them as a live archive that is rarely accessed.  Is this even possible?

My system’s storage at the moment looks like this (and will be similar after a “soon” upgrade):

• 120GB SSD – C: Windows 7 system files and applications (no swap file)
• 750GB 7200rpm HDD – D: Users directories and other documents and temp files
• also on the 750GB HDD – E: Software archive
• 4TB HDD – F: Archive of Music, video recordings, DVD backups, etc (mostly large files)
• 3TB 7200rpm HDD – G: Games, and overflow from the video archive

Drive F: is the one that’s had issues in the past, with the replacement shown.

One last piece of data.  I was advised to set a short power-down interval for F:, but when I did this in Windows 7, the drive disappeared and didn’t come back without rebooting.  I’m wondering if Windows 10 (after my system upgrade) will be able to power down the drive without breaking things;  and whether it will allow different power-down intervals for different drives.

So, with all that data, my questions are:

1. Is a live hard drive that’s only accessed occasionally (my F: drive) more prone to failure?
2. Are there sleep settings in Windows 10 that can alleviate that problem?  What are they?
3. Would I be better off moving drive F: out of the case and accessing it through a USB3 hot-dock?  (Or would that reduce its life even further?)

This has been incredibly frustrating, and very hard to get credible information on!

Thanks in advance for any good advice.

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Pstepanas, I am not a drive expert bu I can try ad help. There are many here that have very good suggestions that may come in at a later time.

1) What is the brand of drive? For example if it is a WD you may go get the WD diagnostics and run a Quick or LONG test on it. Don’t write zeros! Just do the tests.

2) do you have another cable to replace? See this:
“…after replacing the HDD (!), trying to manipulate the “green” features on the drive and the board, and following every thread possible in GoogleWorld, I found someone that said that it’s a very, very, very long shot, but replace the SATA cable. And I did. Mind you, it was the second time I did that. So, two faulty SATA cables. yep. And it now works flawlessly. And I couldn’t believe it.”

At another forum they said the same:
“Well the disk check completed normally and no errors were found on the drive. I guess it was the sata cable- the last thing I tried, because I figured it was the least likely. So I guess there was nothing wrong with the drive rather it was a bad sata cable.”

Sata Hard Drive Disappearing From System, Then Re-appearing At Reboot…
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/sata-hard-drive-disappearing-from-system-then-re-appearing-at-reboot.2471113/

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/hdd-disappears-and-reappears/74caade9-61ed-440b-ac5c-0b78ac1a7631

In Toms Hardware one said, “I had a similar problem with my data drive (a second drive separate from my OS drive) randomly disappearing. It would be recognized again if I rebooted. The problem was solved when I updated my audio driver for another reason. Apparently the second hard drive and the sound card shared the same IRQ channel. For some reason, updating the audio driver resolved conflicts between them.” The response was, “Well I figured why not update audio drivers along with other driver updates i could find and see if it fixes it. Ever since i havnt had any more random restarts and hard drive disappearances. Cant say for sure this fixed it but it hasnt done anything weird since. ”

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/hard-drive-randomly-seems-to-disappear-and-reappear.1731426/

I think that is weird, but we (askwoody’s) just had a guy bmeacham with bad network dropping issue and finally found out it was his updating a video driver that caused it. He restored the registry to an earlier time before the video driver update and fixed it.

I hope this gets you started on the right track.

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Maybe try Power Options > Change Advanced Power Settings > HDD (default on Win7 is 10minBattery/20pluggedIn?).  Try a longer time frame.  Also, open Windows Explorer, right click on said Disk, go to Properties, General, is “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in additon to properties” checked?  (in theory, that should help keep it spinning longer when checked -although I subscribe to the unindexed notion for SSDs , M.2’s -but HDDs, I leave it.).  Also depends on your Windows Search, and Indexing Options. Strange how win10 sees the drive as a cursory look online seemed to indicate more win10 users had your issue, but again I didn’t look too deep.  You could also look into AAM/APM control settings (an easy way to tweak those is using an app. like CrystalDiskInfo).  Good luck.

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PStepanas wrote:

Is a live hard drive that’s only accessed occasionally (my F: drive) more prone to failure?

No. Windows powers down drives automatically unless you change the default power plan.

PStepanas wrote:

Are there sleep settings in Windows 10 that can alleviate that problem?  What are they?

The problem is very unlikely to be related to powering down drives. More likely a cable or controller problem.
Move the drive to a different controller port and see what happens.
Check the SMART data on the drive with the portable version of CrystalDiskInfo or Hard Disk Sentinel trial.

PStepanas wrote:

Would I be better off moving drive F: out of the case and accessing it through a USB3 hot-dock?

Nope. Find out what is wrong and fix it – it may be a coincidence.

cheers, Paul

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anonymous wrote:

we (askwoody’s) just had a guy bmeacham with bad network dropping issue and finally found out it was his updating a video driver that caused it. He restored the registry to an earlier time before the video driver update and fixed it.

Actually it was not the video driver.  It was something called Degoo that I installed shortly after updating the video driver. I had uninstalled Degoo, but apparently the uninstall was not complete. Restoring to a point before the video driver also restored to before Degoo installation. I later updated the video driver again and have had no problems.

1 user thanked author for this post.

mledman

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