Disappearing Hard Drive

[twalls]

I currently have two SSDs and a mechanical drive in my system. The HDD is a Western Digital Black 2TB, and it will disappear every now and then. I currently use it as a secondary drive for storing games where I don't care as much about speed. No data goes on there that I care about, so this hasn't been a priority for me. If it dies, I'll just get a new one and re-download from Steam. However, it has happened enough now where I'm starting to get annoyed.

• It will work fine in Windows up to the reboot where it disappears. It doesn't seem to just stop working while Windows is still running.
• It will no longer show up in the BIOS on subsequent reboots. The SATA port will appear empty.
• There are no errors in Windows. The drive is just gone.
• Rebooting doesn't make the drive come back.
• Powering off the computer and powering it back on fixes it every time.
• The drive has lasted a year like this, so if this is an indicator of drive failure, it is failing really slowly.
• I don't know why, but it does seem like it gets triggered by certain Windows 10 updates (i.e., Anniversary Update, some cumulative updates, etc.)?

Anyone see anything like this? I get that there are only so many points of failure (drive, cable, port, power), so I'm really just curious to see if anyone has seen this particular set of symptoms? Others seem to run into problems where the drive just randomly disconnects, they get errors, etc. This drive passes diagnostics from WD, has no SMART errors, and has been the primary storage for my games until recently (e.g., it sees a fair amount of heavy usage). Other than the random disappearing act, it has been a solid drive.

 

Specs below and in profile:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz
• Motherboard: MSI Z170A GAMING M9 ACK
• RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000
• GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB FTW3
• Storage: Samsung 850 Pro Series 256GB, Western Digital Black Series 2TB, Samsung 960 Pro Series 1TB
• PSU: Corsair RM650i

Any helpful ideas, thoughts, etc. are appreciated!

[PorkishPig]

10 minutes ago, twalls said:

I currently have two SSDs and a mechanical drive in my system. The HDD is a Western Digital Black 2TB, and it will disappear every now and then. I currently use it as a secondary drive for storing games where I don't care as much about speed. No data goes on there that I care about, so this hasn't been a priority for me. If it dies, I'll just get a new one and re-download from Steam. However, it has happened enough now where I'm starting to get annoyed.

• It will work fine in Windows up to the reboot where it disappears. It doesn't seem to just stop working while Windows is still running.
• It will no longer show up in the BIOS on subsequent reboots. The SATA port will appear empty.
• There are no errors in Windows. The drive is just gone.
• Rebooting doesn't make the drive come back.
• Powering off the computer and powering it back on fixes it every time.
• The drive has lasted a year like this, so if this is an indicator of drive failure, it is failing really slowly.
• I don't know why, but it does seem like it gets triggered by certain Windows 10 updates (i.e., Anniversary Update, some cumulative updates, etc.)?

Anyone see anything like this? I get that there are only so many points of failure (drive, cable, port, power), so I'm really just curious to see if anyone has seen this particular set of symptoms? Others seem to run into problems where the drive just randomly disconnects, they get errors, etc. This drive passes diagnostics from WD, has no SMART errors, and has been the primary storage for my games until recently (e.g., it sees a fair amount of heavy usage). Other than the random disappearing act, it has been a solid drive.

 

Specs below and in profile:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz
• Motherboard: MSI Z170A GAMING M9 ACK
• RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000
• GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB FTW3
• Storage: Samsung 850 Pro Series 256GB, Western Digital Black Series 2TB, Samsung 960 Pro Series 1TB
• PSU: Corsair RM650i

Any helpful ideas, thoughts, etc. are appreciated!

 

According to the M.2/SATA combination table SATA_EX2, SATA5, and SATA6 when a PCIe M.2 SSD is inserted. Make sure that you do not have the WD drive plugged into any of these ports. I have found that in some cases the drives will be detected by Windows for a short period of time and then fail to be recognized, even when the motherboard claims they have been disabled.

 

http://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/E7966v1.0.zip pages 33 and 35

[twalls]

Thanks for verifying. I did not state this in the original post, but this problem happened before I installed the M.2 drive, so that should rule that out. I did study this chart prior to acquiring the M.2 to verify compatibility.

 

M2_2: Samsung 960 Pro

SATA1: Samsung 850 Pro

SATA2: WD Black

 

This is a supported configuration in the chart above.

 

To clarify, the drive stays working in Windows for a majority of the time. It only occasionally disappears during certain reboots.