Case of the Mysterious Dissapearing Hard Drive

[ripthesystem]

I had a problem with a hard drive a few months ago: here

I ended up deciding it was likely a heat issue since I had it sandwiched between 2 other HDD's. The drive seemed hotter to the touch than the other drives and the system would inadvertantly lock up and upon reboot the drive would be missing from Windows even though the BIOS would see it fine.

So, the drive tested fine, I got rid of it and replaced it with a new drive. I rearranged the inside of my case and bought a drive cooler with temperature sensors for it and opened up the rest of the case a bit and added another case fan. My system is as cool as ever and the new drive ran fine and holds steady at about 30degrees C.

Now it's been about a month or 2 and all of a sudden I'm starting to have the EXACT same problem as I had before. The system will lock up, seemably at random, sometimes several times in one day, sometimes not for days and mostly when I'm not using that drive directly (I mainly just use it for storage). Then after a reboot, the drive shows fine in BIOS but may or may not show in Windows. If it shows in Windows then I might again experience the lockup problem. If it doesn't, I won't.

But it's a brand new drive that has never gotten over 35C under heavy load. It IS an SATA drive and I'm wondering if it's the controller on the MOBO or perhaps the cable that it's using. Could it be something else? I'm not in a $$ position to start playing the lets replace this hardware and see if it fixes it til I get it right game and I would like to narrow down the possiblities as much as possible. I'm wondering if I'm on track or if there's something I might be missing.

Thanks in advance!

 

[ripthesystem]

ttt

 

[Bobthelost]

So you had 3 drives + in your system, one of them seemed to cause a reliability problem, you pulled it and installed a new drive instead which now suffers the exact same problem, despite being well within operating spec and using a different interface (not sure on this one)?

Have you tried connecting the drive to a different wire? Swap the power and data cables for a neighbouring drive and see if that drive malfunctions.

Are you sure its' the drive at fault here, could it be that windows is broken not the hardware? I'd think hard about backing up everything one weekend and reinstalling windows from scratch.

 

[ripthesystem]

OK, sorry for the confusion here. I have more than 3 drives in the system.
I had 1 SATA drive that was causing me problems. I thought it might be heat related. I replaced that drive with a new SATA drive on the same cable/connection and it's now in a drive cooler and running well within spec. It worked flawlessly for a while. Now it is giving me the exact same problems as before.

I haven't tried connecting the drive to a different wire but that does seem like a not so expensive way to go about it. Could a faulty cable cause a problem like this?

I'm pretty sure it's not Windows, otherwise wouldn't it affect other drives in the system and not just the one?

 

[ripthesystem]

^^^

 

[Bobthelost]

The orriginal SATA connectors tend to be far too easy to disconect and it could be the wire or SATA port it's plugged into, probably isn't but it could be. On this one i don't know what the problem is, but it's not the HD at fault obviously.

It's either the motherboard at fault, or it's the OS and drivers. I recon it's the mobo. Check you've got the latest drivers from the website and fire a question off by email to the makers of the board.