Windows 7 - Mysterious Vanishing HDD

So I have had a problem recently. One specific drive in my machine keeps disappearing from my computer. I know this could be the sign of a failing drive. I doubt that very much for one good reason. Restarting my computer brings it back. The problem often happens after I have had this machine up for a couple of days without a restart.

I don't use sleep or hibernate or tell anything to turn off after X amount of time. I have also never had this issue before until recently.

The only new piece of hardware I can think of is my external 2tb drive.

Other recent issues involve a delay when I go to empty my trash bin or access a drive in my computer. Seems like if the system goes idle for a while I have a couple second delay at which time i hear the external drive kick on. I believe this is related to the power saving options of the 2tb drive though and at this time I am not finding a solid link between these 2 weird happenings.

Anyone have any suggestions of what may be happening here?

Make sure you check this setting:

Go to Control Panel > Power Options > click on your current Power Plan: Change Plan Settings > click on Change Advanced Power Settings > expand the listing for Hard Disk > expand Turn Off Hard Disk After > and be sure the option selected is "Never".
Then test to see if that makes any difference.

But I already said I had that all set to off right in my post. Keep in mind I am far from new to all of this. I am only having problems trying to figure this one out because of the nature of it. I have never seen a HDD do this before and it has not done this until recently on this system.

Just to eliminate the possibility use a drive test for your brand drive. 7 Free Hard Drive Testing Software Tools
If you did not manually set the power options to Never, the default is for things to power down after a set time. I know you mentioned this, just checking.

I actually went back into the power options and check to make sure that it was still set the way I set it long ago. And yes sure enough all of my power options are completely optimized.

I noticed my card reader/floppy combo is no longer showing up now I think it may have died entirely. Because I am having so many minor issues I may have to start going over this system from top to bottom. I don't see any reason I should have so many small issues but it could be failing hardware just coincidence etc or it may be a windows issue and maybe it is time to reload this badboy. Has been a while since I had to load this thing. I sure dread that though lol.

UPDATE: The drive is passing all tests without a problem. Like I said though I have my doubts that the drive is failing. I think the problem is something else. I may reload this system soon just to see if I can remedy the issue that way. If it did persist I would at least have an idea if the OS or a specific piece of software were the cause. I may have other pieces of hardware causing an issue for all I know. It would not be out of the ordinary for hardware to cause issues in places that seem weird.

I also found a fan that just wore out and stopped moving I need to unplug that those have also been known to foul things up and in some cases even prevent the system from booting up. Usually when connected directly to the motherboard like this one is.

Guess it all comes down to performing a major system overhaul to get this rig back in clean working order.