Weird issue with hard drive

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Skillz
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Weird issue with hard drive

Post by Skillz »

So a while back I bought a new WD Red NAS 12TB drive for my NAS to hold my Plex library. Since day one I've been having issues with Windows 7 losing the drive. If I go into Disk Management and rescan disks, it always comes back. Though after a day, week or sometimes a couple weeks the drive will disappear again.

When it first started doing this (the day I bought the drive) it did it every single day. So I replaced the SATA data cable with a new one. Problem, I thought, fixed itself but now it still happens, though not as often. Possible I could have had two bad SATA cables?

The system is an X99 based motherboard with a E5-4620v3 Xeon 10c/20t CPU and 48GB RAM running Windows 7 Professional. It's also got two 280X GPUs in the system that mostly run Milkyway@Home. No issues with anything else. Just that one drive. It replaced a 1TB drive that was in the system prior and I had no iusses with that drive (using the same power cable, data cable and sata port)

I have even went as far as to just switch the data cable with another drive, but the problem follows the 12TB drive.

I have 6x 3TB drives, 1x 8TB drive, 1x 12TB drive and a 500GB SSD (boot/os) in the system. No other drive experiences this issue.

Any ideas on what could be causing this issue?
Is their a a command line I could setup in a script to periodically rescan disks? While this isn't a real fix, it would solve the issue of it going away if I rescan the disks every hour on a script. lol
StefanR5R
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Re: Weird issue with hard drive

Post by StefanR5R »

Just a shot in the dark:
Does the BIOS offer any SATA link power management options, which you could disable?
Icecold
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Re: Weird issue with hard drive

Post by Icecold »

Windows also has the "shut down drive after ___ minutes" setting in the power management options which could be worth disabling.
Skillz
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Re: Weird issue with hard drive

Post by Skillz »

I will check both of them, but I suspect since I download "linux distros" the drive is being accessed at all times that it wont go into a "not running" state to trigger those.
crashtech
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Re: Weird issue with hard drive

Post by crashtech »

I might put the drive into another system and see if the problem is replicated there. I use FreeNAS for my NAS, but I don't run GPUs in it either. It's actually my only single-purpose box. Win 7 seems like a sub-optimal choice for a NAS, but if the 280x's need to be in there, it's understandable I guess.
Icecold
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Re: Weird issue with hard drive

Post by Icecold »

I would recommend storing any Linux distros you're seeding on a separate drive or drives than what is being accessed through your plex library. It's probably not your issue but once your have a lot of Linux isos being accessed at the same time as well as trying to act as a file server for plex it's going to really affect the read and write speed of the drive and potentially cause issues.

I would also probably not use an end of lifed OS for something like that but that's of course not causing your drive to lose connectivity.
Skillz
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Re: Weird issue with hard drive

Post by Skillz »

I've had the system for a really long time. I just upgrade bits and pieces of it as I go along and the operating system hasn't been one of the "to-dos" in a long time.

With that being said, even though my Plex library is accessing the content on the drives; I do not have that many people on my Plex account. There may be 1 stream a day or less on average. Even then, I have the library spanned across 8 different drives.

With that being said, I think there might be something wrong with the drive after all. I've gone weeks without it having issues and lastnight and tonight it's suddenly started giving me lots of issues with it disappearing from Windows again. Rescanning was fixing the issue, but this last time I was downloading about 6 ISO totaling around 40GB of data with the biggest ISO being about 20GB. On the 20GB download (after the others finished) it disappeared about 6 times in the span of 1 hour. The last time it did it, a rescan didn't find it anymore. So I swapped the data cable with one of the other drives and tried to scan it again. Nada. Rebooted the system and the drive is back. It finished the download and so far all seems well.
StefanR5R
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Re: Weird issue with hard drive

Post by StefanR5R »

Did you ever take the time to run a full scan for bad sectors on this drive?
Another idea to test would be to downgrade the port to SATA-2 (3 Gb/s, 300 MB/s), *if* this is possible in the driver or in the BIOS.
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