Hard Drive not staying connected

[Doggie504]

Well i don't do pointless steps, but finally hooked it up via USB and Directly, and STILL nothing its got to be the drive itself. i have a WD15EARS and a WD20EARX.

[Zer010]

Originally Posted by Doggie504

Well i don't do pointless steps, but finally hooked it up via USB and Directly, and STILL nothing its got to be the drive itself. i have a WD15EARS and a WD20EARX.

Those are decent drives, hopefully they can be RMA'd. Do you have any other drives to test the bay to be safe?

[Doggie504]

Sorry if that sounded short, but i can get 3/5 of my drive to read in any bay configuration and 2/5 only work sometimes no matter how its hooked up. But they are the highest capacity drives.

Additional Comment:

The WD15EARS is going to back due to an I/O error, but they are going to screw me on the one, they are sending me one with 16MB of cache >.>

[PommieB]

The Usb buss and sata buss are closely associated, get a fault on one it effects other. I've also had problems with the Wd green drives, I was getting nowhere with them till I isolated them from both the usb buss and the sata buss, I did this through port multiplication, through it the drives ran perfectly, I'm not saying the 1,5TB drives not faulty, but I doubt both are. Fitting the jumper fixed the issue on every drive, I've six of them. No 1.5's though.

[Doggie504]

Originally Posted by PommieB

The Usb buss and sata buss are closely associated, get a fault on one it effects other. I've also had problems with the Wd green drives, I was getting nowhere with them till I isolated them from both the usb buss and the sata buss, I did this through port multiplication, through it the drives ran perfectly, I'm not saying the 1,5TB drives not faulty, but I doubt both are. Fitting the jumper fixed the issue on every drive, I've six of them. No 1.5's though.

Where exactly do i fit this jumper?

[PommieB]

Here's a link from the WD site.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/...ZEZFUDV2Kms%3D

You want the PHY setting, it limits the speed the speed to 3gb/s, as your not even going to get half of that, it doesn't matter. If your running on sata2, you definitely need this jumper on WD sata3 - 600gb/s drives, the spec's bull, your drives going to get around 110gb/s maximum regardless of what your on.

If this doesn't work, then you can start thinking about a faulty drive.

The 1.5 tb EARS is sata 2 but is no longer sold by WD, it's been discontinued, so I'd say that particular series of drives had problems, the 2.0TB EARS is sata2 which I haven't seen sold for quite some time, the EARX is sata3 and needs the jumper, I was a bit surprised/ suspicious when they offered you a different drive, they only do that with discontinued products.

Hears a link on the the green drives.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=120

[DarkFox]

Rating: 5/5Fix for disappearing WD15EARS

Pros: --Capacity: 1.5TB is a lot of space.
--Price: $0.07 per GB is such a deal.
--Noise: Very quiet drive.
--Heat: Stays nice and cool (28C/83F)
Cons: --I started having a bug where the drive would disappear after resuming the computer from sleep/suspend/hibernate. It no longer appeared in My Computer, Computer Management, Device Manager, etc. I eventually found a fix, described below. This fix would also apply to other large (>1TB) drives, such as the WD10EARS or WD20EARS
Other Thoughts: Apparently, when you boot your system out of sleep/suspend/hibernate, Windows has a limit on how long hard drives can take to spin up. This value is around 10 seconds, but I'm not sure. If a drive takes longer than this, it throws a STOP Error and the drive is not recognized until after a restart. Based on the S.M.A.R.T. data, this drive is NOT taking more than that long (mine says around 5900ms). However, I suspect that the GreenPower technology that tries to minimize power usage is confusing Windows and making it think that the drive isn't spinning up. Fortunately, there's a fix.

If you Google "977178" the first result is a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that discusses an issue with large (>1TB) SATA drives disappearing. There is a free downloadable patch included. When I downloaded and applied this patch, all the issues were resolved, and my drive stopped disappearing.

TLDR: Google "977178" and downloaded the fix.

Additional Comment:

The 2tb IS a sata 3 drive and needs the sata 2 compatability jumper.

Additional Comment:

You really need to learn to calm down, and not right off valuable troubleshooting steps as "pointless steps." Proper troubleshooting is a process of elimination.

[Doggie504]

So my brand new 990 Chipset board is not SATA 3?

Additional Comment:

That hot fix MAY have done the trick(working for now), also if my new ASUS 990X board does not have sata 3 that must mean its not out yet?

Also the reason is wrote off those steps is because they were useless except try it in another computer i knew the cables were good.

[PommieB]

Brand new motherboards, depending on how much you pay have varying types of sata connectors, a cheap motherboard will have two native sata3 connections, maybe four native sata 2 connections and 2 or 4 non- native sata3 connections, a mid priced motherboard will have 3 or maybe 4 native sata 3 connections and varying amounts of native sata 2 and non-native sata3, expensive motherboards have as many as 6 native sata3 connectors.

Native connectors are controlled by the main Intel chipset, non- native connectors by a different chipset.

It's reason that when someone doesn't specify what motherboard or other info is, it's difficult to pin down exactly what the problem is, we ask these questions for a reason.

Instead of making silly/smart comments like those in your additional comments, you should do research on the parts you used to build your computer with and a big change in attitude towards other people would help considerably, you haven't had the decency to thank one person on this thread that as tried to help you.

My advice is learn something about computers, you know very little.

Goodbye.

[Doggie504]

I do know alot about computers,i knew its was something stupid like what fixed this and i thank you for finding that hotfix for me

Additional Comment:

And thankfully i did not need to do the jumper thing, found NONE laying around my house lol.

[PommieB]

It's not a hot fix, it's the way WD assures compatibility with Sata2. How did you fix it anyway. You should read the specs of your brand new 990 motherboard, there's a big difference between knowing about computers or even building them, it's when things go wrong or fail that you need a lot more than average knowledge to fix those problems.

[Doggie504]

It has 6 SATA 3 and 2 Sata 2, those SATA 2 are a PITA, it slows down my boot time.

[DarkFox]

wow you are a *****. I'm done trying to help you out. You come on the forums, ask for help, provide little to no info, and still post inflamitory comments after your stuff gets fixed.

None of the steps are useless, they are proper troubleshooting and may still help if your problem isnt 100% resolved. (I.E. if the lvl10 GT built in bay has an issue carrying sata 3 through it for the 2tb drive.)

Also, you never stated you had a brand new 990 Asus, I was going off your signature that says you have a M4A78-E

Good luck with your future on these forums. I'll make sure to keep my useless years of experience and practical troubleshooting as well as research into your specific hardware and related windows hot fixes to your issues, out of your threads as to not clutter up your rant on why everything is broken and you need help but no one has any thing usefull to offer cause you dismiss it all before you try it.

[PommieB]

I like threads like this, the guy's showing everybody here what he's like and what little he knows, which isn't much, mind he's probably trolling anyway, he's not doing that very well either. Ah well that's life on a forum.

I've had my fun, I'm un-subscribing, he should have named this thread, drat I can't think of a name bad enough. HA HA HA. Looking forward to his next post.

[mimart7]

Medical thread?

[Doggie504]

Originally Posted by PommieB

I like threads like this, the guy's showing everybody here what he's like and what little he knows, which isn't much, mind he's probably trolling anyway, he's not doing that very well either. Ah well that's life on a forum.

I've had my fun, I'm un-subscribing, he should have named this thread, drat I can't think of a name bad enough. HA HA HA. Looking forward to his next post.

I know you wont read this, but i do know what im doing. I dont know how many times i had to tell you it wasn't the cables because i was trying different bays(Where working drives where), guess you weren't reading was i was posting.

[PommieB]

Actually I only mentioned the sata cables once which was for elimination purposes in the first post I made, because sata cables supplied by motherboard manufacturers and PSU manufacturers do fail and I don't particularly care how much knowledge on computers you have either, you asked for help, we tried to help you and you ignored just about everything that was suggested because you thought you knew better, it's not your knowledge that's the problem, it's your attitude.

I've just spent the two hours tracing a fault in my own computer, do you know what the problem was, a faulty esata cable, it totally screwed up the computer, including causing freezing and slow write performance, changed the cable, everything's back to normal.

I read everything you posted, most of it was nonsense or irrelevant.

Don't blame me for your attitude, change it and you'll get on well here, personally I couldn't care less one way or the other.

The mistakes I made was not realizing that WD actually made the sata 2 green drives at 1.5TB and 2.0TB, one that ( 1.5TB ) as been discontinued anyway.

[Doggie504]

I'm getting screwed on that, sending me a 16MB Cache version for the dead one >.>

Sorry for the attitude, but this problem has been haunting me for weeks. More then just you kept mentioning the cables though.

Anyway thanks for the help.

[PommieB]

Because cheap cables cause a lot of problems, the esata cable I had problems with was supplied by Corsair and eventually failed causing the computer to freeze, first symptom before freezing was with windows files like the rubbish bin taking awhile to come up, unusual with ssd drives and encoding speeds were down, the bad cable was effecting the whole computer, the only reason I took a couple of hours was the ITB Samsung F1's, bought 2 years back and ones already failed, the symptoms were identical, the drive tested okay, started looking elsewhere, first on the list, cables.

Much better attitude by the way.

[Zer010]

Originally Posted by Doggie504

I'm getting screwed on that, sending me a 16MB Cache version for the dead one >.>

Sorry for the attitude, but this problem has been haunting me for weeks. More then just you kept mentioning the cables though.

Anyway thanks for the help.

Its cool we have all been there. I am curious though were you able to find any drive under 1 TB to complete your testing?

Another cavet here is that the JMicron JMB362 controller is know for being a PITA. Specs I re-read the thread but it wasn't mentioned to which port you had it plugged in. Worth checking imho.