Hard Drive sometimes not showing up

[Wysoseriouss]

Hey,

 

So, sometimes my E (main games and general storage) drive doesn't show up when I boot into windows. I have 3 drives in my PC, my SSD boot drive ©, my storage drive (E) and a media drive (F). I have tried several troubleshooting steps to try to isolate the issue. I have: (in order)

 

• Replaced the drive (and while replacing the drive, I also changed the SATA cable).
• Formatted the replacement drive so everything was clean from day 1.
• Changed the SATA cable again.
• Changed to a different SATA port on the motherboard.
• Plugged in a different power cable from the PSU.

 

It is always the E drive, regardless of the SATA cable or port. This has been happening since I had windows 8.1 on my system and I have since upgraded to Windows 10. The problem does resolve itself after restarting the computer, but it can take more then 1 try to get it to show up again (the most retries is 8 according to my partner).

 

So, as far as I can conclude, it's not my OS, or my SATA cable, or my SATA port, or the hard drive itself. The last thing I can think of is it being the motherboard, but I would have thought changing the SATA port would have eliminated that possibility, however, my knowledge (while not insignificant) is still limited, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

[comefightme]

I have the same drive configuration with you with the exact drive letters assigned to them but i haven't seen this problem, it is really strange

[haifisch]

Try to read SMART data from the hard drive with a program for example hard disk sentinel, there might be something

[Wysoseriouss]

So I ran Hard Disk Sentinal, it says my drives are all ok and healthy, but it did note that "problems did occur between the communication of the disk and host 103 times". Any ideas based on that?
Screenshots below:

 

[haifisch]

Communication errors usually occur with a bad sata cable. It's confusing because you already changed the cable. Try running a short self test on a drive. But I think the drive itself should be ok as you replaced the old one.

[Wysoseriouss]

Alright, it might be possible that I was unlucky enough to switch to another bad cable lol. I'll try switching cable again, I'm pretty sure I have another one lying around somewhere. See how that goes.

[haifisch]

It may be the case that you changed your cable for another defective one. How is it going?

[Wysoseriouss]

I finally got around to switching out for a brand new cable, and so far so good, it's been 4 days without a single issue. Thanks for your help man, this has been bugging me for a while now.