Drive drops?

[Adcadet]

In my PC I've got two WD Caviar Green 20EARX drives in a hot swap bay plugged into the Marvel SATA III slots on my Asus P8P67 Pro (rev 3). One of the two drives keeps dropping. Same drive every time. The drive is a dynamic disk with a single partition. I'm running Win7 64 bit. Every hour or so, it will drop. Doesn't seem to matter if CrashPlan is actually writing to the disk or not. Disappears from My Computer. Windows Disk management says the drive is "missing" and the partition has "failed". Right clicking to reactive disk brings up a warning to run chkdsk on each volume (I ran this a while ago, didn't make a difference, am re-trying now) but I can't get the drive to reactivate. Physically removing the drive and re-inserting it will bring the drive back. Moving the drive to between the two hot swap bays doesn't make a difference. Turning the Windows power scheme to never spin down hard drives has made no difference.

Another weird thing that doesn't really bother me: sometimes the second drive, when it contains nothing, will incorrectly appear with a red bar in My computer, showing that it only has a few hundred GB's left. After a while it corrects itself. Not sure if this has anything to do with anything.

Anybody have thoughts on what's going on?

 

[Stereodude]

It the drive overheating?

 

[timwhit]

Maybe the hot swap bay is bad. Can you try switching the drives and see if the same drive fails or the same bay?

 

[Mercutio]

Putting aside my well justified thirst for justice with regard to WD, it's been my observation that neither WD nor Seagate "green" drives work all that will for anything other than single drive bulk storage. Why is your drive a dynamic disk? Is it part of a softRAID or something?

I've observed "green" drives to behave poorly in eSATA enclosures or when used as part of any sort of array, even a mirror set. I try really hard not to buy those drives.

 

[Bozo]

Putting aside my well justified thirst for justice with regard to WD, it's been my observation that neither WD nor Seagate "green" drives work all that will for anything other than single drive bulk storage. Why is your drive a dynamic disk? Is it part of a softRAID or something?

I've observed "green" drives to behave poorly in eSATA enclosures or when used as part of any sort of array, even a mirror set. I try really hard not to buy those drives.

Agreed.

You might try upgrading the Marvel drivers.

 

[MaxBurn]

I'm kind of thinking cabling and those hot swap bays are at fault. Easy to test with a new cable straight to the drives.

 

[ddrueding]

If you swap the drives so that the offending disk is on the other cable, port, and power connector do you still have issues?

I'll second those here with issues getting "green" drives to work in RAID. In particular hardware or SoftRAID configurations. For the most part I've gotten Windows Dynamic Disks to work with these drives, so I'm not sure if this is your issue or not.

 

[Adcadet]

Thanks all for your input.

The drive problems happen with the same HD in both of my two hot swap bays. The other drive, same model, has no issues. Makes me think cabling is not the issue. Both go to a different SATA port, both on the Marvel controller. Same PS cable going to the hot swap backplate.

Dynamic disk because I was thinking of creating a mirror set with them, then decided not to. These drives are not RAIDed.

Started an error check today before leaving for work. Stuck saying "294 files processed". But the drive had dropped again. This time won't detect when unplugged and re-plugged.

 

[Adcadet]

Formatted both drives as basic disks. We'll see if the drive remains flaky.

 

[Adcadet]

No drops since formatting the drives as basic drives. Wonder why.

 

[Stereodude]

Did you do a full format or a quick format?

 

[Adcadet]

Quick.

 

[LunarMist]

I run a full low level drive test on each drive before using them with data. However, I find that most of the time drives drop out there is a issue with the power supply/connectors or a defective board.