HDD disconnects under stress
Recently my internal Seagate 1TB HDD has been disconnecting under what I assume is "stressfull". One way I have been have to trigger the disconnect is to record a game in Dxtory or other forms of sustained file transfers.
A system restart does not bring the HDD back, only a full shutdown enables it. The HDD does not show under Administrative Tools > Storage while disconnected. There are no obvious problems with the SMART report so I have at a loss. My main suspicion is a faulty SATA cable, but I am unsure if I should just purchase another one to try.
I have read online about the HDD shutdown feature of Windows power management so I have set the drive to never shutdown. However, a file transfer is not "idle" time so that shouldn't be the issue either. It can be hard to trigger the problem whenever I want, but whenever it has occured it has been during a transfer of some form.
My PCs specs are:
- Core i5 2500k
- Radeon 6950 Direct CuII Asus
- 8GB Mushkin Blackline RAM
- Asus P8z68-v PRO Motherboard
- Seasonic 800W PSU
- 2x Seagate 1TB HDD
- Samsung Evo 120GB SSD
- 3x Monitors
- 2x DVD drives
- Antec 1200 case
Solution 1:
As Lawrence mentioned, I too thought of the PSU as I read about your symptoms. Usually HDDs only draw around 6-12Watts, but it might be on an unstable rail or just a failing power supply. Do you have other peripherals (another HDD perhaps) on the same PSU connection?
It could also be the SATA cable, they are cheap enough that it might be worth trying just in case. If you have a SATA optical drive you could try swapping the cables and seeing if the problem persists with the different cable.
I would also try a different SATA port on the motherboard, some motherboards actually have different chips for different SATA ports so by switching ports you might be changing all the circuitry associated with the HDD also.
Lastly, just run an antivirus scan just to make sure something isn't stealing resources when it's not supposed to.