Windows 7 - HDD Disappears on Resume from Sleep

I recently replaced my 320gb boot HDD with an Intel X-25 160gb SSD using the Intel migration tool. The system worked fine except the nVidia drivers don't support TRIM. So I tried the Intel SSD Toolbox which is supposed to manually send the TRIM command to the SSD. The tool box can see the SSD but the button to send the TRIM command is greyed out.

I did some reading and found some had success with this configuration by switching from the nVidia IDE/ATA drivers to the default Windows drivers. I did this and voila, the SSD Toolbox works and sends the TRIM command. But now I have a new problem.

Whenever the system recovers from sleep, my secondary HDD is missing. It doesn't show up in Disk Manager and rescanning the disks does not find it. The only way to get the HDD back is to reboot. The BIOS never has an issue seeing the disk and neither does Windows after boot. Only after sleep. I'm assuming this is because I'm not using the nVidia drivers.

Am I stuck choosing between a disappearing HDD and an SSD that will eventually fill w/ junk?

System

Windows 7 x64 Home Premium
XFX 780i mobo
Intel 160gb SSD (g2)
Seagate 500gb HDD
all drivers are current

Are you using AHCI drivers and is your second drive large?

You receive various Stop error messages in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2 when you try to resume a computer that has a large SATA hard disk

In the case above it ends up with a stop because it is the system disk. disks other than the system just won't show up. I am pretty confident it is because your hard drive isn't spinning up fast enough. From the above it is apparent that if hard drive doesn't come up fast enough from sleep, windows will ignore it, even if you scan for hardware changes.

Anyhow, the above hotfix resolved my disappearing drive issue.

The drive is 500gb. Not sure what constitutes "large". I'm using sata in IDE mode as nVidia does not support AHCI. I tried the hotfix anyway but the problem persists.

It sure seems to me that these are all related. Windows appears not to recognize a drive if it doesn't spin up in time - even if you scan new hardware.

Only thing I can suggest is to look in the system log for errors on your hard driv.

Gene