Drive G: intermittently disappears

Thanks to everyone who assisted/educated me in this thread. I've not had a problem with my drive disappearing so I'm marking this thread as solved.

Sorry to report that Drive G disappeared again. I just got back from taking a large number of photos so I decided to plugin the USB 3.0 Card reader on my PCI card to speed the download of the memory card. All went well initially. Using lightroom I generated preview after importing my photos. LR kept saying loading so I decided to optimize the catalog. After that was successfully performed I noticed ? in the location of my photos (an indication of missing location) and sure enough the G: drive was gone. I'm thinking of changing the SATA port that Drive G: uses but will wait till you guys give me some input.

I can't pretend to know what is going on there, having never run so many removable drives at once myself.
But since the tests you've run show that the system is capable of working normally then we need to start looking at what makes your system different.

I suspect it has something to do with the add on card you are using to gain additional USB ports or it's driver. I'm thinking that some protocol is not being followed and that is messing up the system.
You could experiment with using powered USB hubs in series, or hard drive enclosures instead, but that requires investment in more hardware.

There is also the possibility that it is the sheer number of removable drives that is the cause. Do you need every one running constantly? It would be interesting to know if there is a "tipping point".

And yes you could try another SATA port for the fixed internal G drive, although I doubt that is the cause. But it can't hurt, might help.

The drive disappeared again this morning. All the Drive are internal except P: and X:. I've disconnected their power supplies and will run the computer with only to internal dirves for a while to see if it happens again. If it doesn't it would point to the PCI USB 3.0 card.

Update. I'm not sure why 2 drives the SSD and 4 TB show up on the computer as IDE during the boot cycle as I have the have it set to AHCI not IDE. I also noticed 2 errors ! in the device manager. I get the feeling these are related.

I would try removing (uninstalling) the PCI USB card and seeing if everything goes back to normal. You have a lot of unusual stuff going on there. That card continues to be the only foreign factor.

Britton30 said:

TVeblen said:

I would try removing (uninstalling) the PCI USB card and seeing if everything goes back to normal. You have a lot of unusual stuff going on there. That card continues to be the only foreign factor.

That may be the root issue. SATA, IDE, and PCIe are on the same bus and may well be overloaded here.
With all the drives connected you are juggling enough data to be a server. Maybe you should look into Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Network-attached storage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

After removing the USB 3 PCI-E card, swapping the cable and SATA port, It appears the the final solution to this problem was turning on AHCI for all the SATA ports except SATA_8 and SATA_9 which are controlled by the Gigabyte chip. This has an IDE port as well as 2 SATAs. The IDE has a DVDROM writer on it. The system has been stable ever since.
A NAS would probably be a good idea. Any recommendations for a brand or model? Thanks again for all the help.