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Why does second hard drive disconnect every 2 hours?

H

hackmole

Senior member
I have an old Pentium 1.6ghz computer with a 40 gig startup drive and an extra 1 terabyte drive. In order for the computer to recognize that 1 terabyte drive, I had to install an extra controller card. Every so often the computer would disconnect from the terabyte drive and then after awhile I noticed that it would do so at around the 2 hour mark or somewhat over that time but never much less than 2 hours. That's OK if you are not going to use it for more than 2 hours but now I am using it for more than two hours on a project and I often have 8 to 10 msWord and Acrobat windows open and it's kind of a pain to restart and then set up again which can take a good 10 minutes as well as being interrupted when you are in the middle of something.

Anyway, I just want to know if anyone has ever had that problem and what the solution might be. I suppose I could buy a new controller card but I'm worried that there might be some complications and I would end up losing all my data.

On top of everything else, it's a big mystery. Why would something cause a disconnection around, but not precisely, the 2 hour mark every single time.

Also I just wanted to mention that this has been going on for at least 5 years or more.
 
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Have you looked at Windows' power-management settings for HDD spindown times, and checked the APM settings set on the drive itself?

Edit: If the HDD is in fact five years old, then it may also be failing and due for a replacement.
 
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Is the drive a Western Digital Green? Those have a pretty short time frame set for no disk access equals auto spin down.
 
Thank you,

There are no settings on in power management.

Also, this problem began from the first day I used the drive with controller card.
I could not run the drive without the extra controller card.

The drive is not a Western Digital, it is Samsung spinpoint SATA2 drive model HD-HD103SJ but didn't have a SATA connection to my board so I got and installed a ST Labs Sata 150 PCI controller card and connected it to the drives with the data and power cables.

My motherboard is an ASUS P4S333-M

Some day, I'd really like to find out what causes the computer to have this 2 hour limitation. And it is not always 2 hours on the nose. Sometimes it can go for as long as 2 hours and 40 minutes. But it never disconnects from the terabyte drive much less than 2 hours. Also the terabyte drive disconnects which means the icon is no longer available on the desktop but my startup drive is still available and does not disconnect or shut down. It's a really weird problem.
 
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