External hard drive disconnects randomly

[AuroraDraco]

I have an external hard drive (TOSHIBA MQ01UBD100) that i save most of my games in, as my laptop's hard drive has very little memory. While playing often do I realise that my hard drive disconnects causing my game to crash which is truly very annoying. Any solutions to this. I can hopefully provide any info you may need.

 

[corkyg]

External HDDs and laptops often have power problems. I find it best to always provide separate power to an external HDD. On laptops, I use a powered hub.

 

[AuroraDraco]

External HDDs and laptops often have power problems. I find it best to always provide separate power to an external HDD. On laptops, I use a powered hub.

Sorry i am kind of a noob but what is a powered hub

 

[corkyg]

A small box with several USB ports that has its own power source - does not use laptop's USB power. Google it.

 

[PliotronX]

USB 3.0 ports usually supply enough amperage for portable HDDs and even with a hub you will want it plugged into one of the 3.0 ports (marked with SS for SuperSpeed usually with a blue tongue). Speaking of which, could you please see what brand of Extensible host controller is in your USB devices within device manager?

 

[corkyg]

I agree - however, he is using a laptop, unspecified, and unless it is the latest model, chances are it does not have a USB 3 port.

 

[PliotronX]

Good call,the giveaway to the age of the laptop is not having much storage because laptops these days are pretty much standard with slow 500GB-1TB drives. Nevermind about 3.0 but most hubs are 3.0 and will work with 2.0 ports. The important part is the discrete power supply and I've got one of these that works well!

 

[corkyg]

Yep!

 

[jkauff]

The drive could be going into sleep/power-saving mode rather than disconnecting. Some brands provide utilities for changing or turning off power-saving. I don't know about Toshiba.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I found that power output of USB ports can vary a lot between systems so I don't like to rely on it for something like a HDD as you don't know from one system to the next if it will provide enough power.

I would use an external power adapter. If the enclosure does not have a separate power port you may need to get creative and inject 5v into the USB one. I've done this, it's safe, just don't get the polarity mixed up.

Though it could also be the drive is going to sleep as suggested. If you can't find a setting to turn this off a quick and dirty way is to write a small script that loops and just writes small amounts of data to it. I had to do this on a Linux server as I mistakenly used drives that go to sleep to build a raid array and the drives kept dropping out of the raid. So I made a script that just does a "dir" and writes the results to a text file then deletes it, and the script runs once a minute. It was enough I/O to stop the drive from going to sleep.