Secondary Hard Drive being lost when primary is busy.

Folks,

I have a strange problem which has gradually been getting worse over the past couple of months. I have a system which I built with a primary SSD containing the OS and a secondary 1Tb WD caviar green drive which contains mostly media files. The second drive is partitioned into 650mb, 250mb and 100mb partitions. The problem started to show up a couple of months ago when the partitions on the secondary drive would randomly disappear. Over time the frequency of the drop out of the secondary drive is increasing.

I have spent some time investigating the problem, as it is getting really frustrating, and have tried the following; replaced the sata cables on both drives, changed the sata ports which the drives are plugged into, changed the secondary drive, run chkdsk on both drives, run WD data lifeguard (took over 4 hours) on the 1TB secondary drive. None of this has made any difference.

What I have discovered is that the problem can be replicated fairly easily. If I use iTunes to play some music from the secondary drive and then launch a disk intensive executable on the primary then the drop out happens if the load on the primary disk lasts long enough. For example loading Opera or Chrome will cause the problem to appear. If I go into the device manager and scan for hardware changes then the missing drive will reappear. It seems to be therefore that there is some kind of bottleneck in the system when the primary drive is busy causing the OS to lose track of the secondary drive. I have checked the BIOS and it is up to date as are the relevant disk drivers.

I'd be grateful if anyone has any suggestions on how to proceed next. The details of the system are contained in my Specs.

Thanks
M.

Hi 23Man.

Could you post a screenshot of your disk layout for us to look at.
(double click the 'Computer' icon on you desktop or select 'Computer' from the Start menu)

Thanks.

Many thanks for your suggestion, which I have implemented. However despite giving labels to all of the partitions the problem still persists.

M.

Good luck with that option 23Man. Unforunately it is turning into a pretty complex issue.
Hopefully that will resolve it.

Will be keen to hear the outcome.

All the best.

Just a quick update, after reading around I decided to run a registry cleaner on my system. It picked up a lot of things which needed to be sorted and after the cleanup the system has remained stable.

I'm going to hold off on the rebuild to see how long the system goes without losing the secondary disk.

M.

Thanks for the update.

Hopefully things have been resolved.

Hi,

after running without problems for five days it looks as if the cleanup of the registry has solved the problem. I'm not 100% sure why this is but I'll take it. Marking the thread as solved.

Thanks to those who helped,

M.