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I've had this problem for quite some time, there are times when it occurs daily and times when it doesn't happen for months.

A little backstory: I had issues with computer freezing and static/noise coming from speakers last year. Apart from that, the issue of one of my 2 hard drives spinning down then spinning back up. It was never the same one hard drive, though it was mostly the one with the Windows partition. Sometimes it would take a lot of "work" getting the PC to power back on after a freeze. I tried manually turning the PSU on back then and that worked as a quick workaround until one day when it died completely.

I changed the motherboard, CPU (because I couldn't find one with the same socket as my CPU). I've been living happily for months until a few days ago when the problems started again.

I currently have an SSD and my 2 old HDDs. The SSD was the one that stopped this time (of course, I didn't hear it "spin down" haha) but unlike the HDD, it didn't go back to normal until I reset the computer. Even then in the BIOS settings it wouldn't always be detected until I plugged the SATA cables out and put them back in. Sometimes it's one of the HDDs, sometimes it's the SSD.

Can you suggest what could be causing these failures? They are annoying and I'm afraid they'll dammage my storage devices.

Additional information: this usually happens under light load, once the PC has been in use for a while it's very unlikely to happen.

Specs: AMD FX-8320 8core 3.5GHz (Formerly intel i5 first gen) Asus M5A97 motherboard 16GB DDR3 1866 MHz AMD Radeon R7 260x 2 HDDs 1 SSD 650W Deluxe PSU

I searched many places on the internet but the answers weren't very helpful in my particular case.

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    Bad power supply?
    – Dan
    Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 19:17
  • What operating system is the computer running? Perhaps the setting to turn off the hard disks after some time is set too low for your usage. In Windows 7 you can find it in "Control Panel"->"Power Options"->(find the selected plan)->"Change plan settings"->"Change advanced power settings"->"Hard disk".
    – Andrew Morton
    Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 20:14
  • I was thinking bad power supply too, but shouldn't there be effects when I connect or disconnect things or change to power saving? Also, the hard drives are not set to turn off, I know of that setting. When it does happen, it can happen even more than one time in a minute.
    – Andrei Sirbu
    Commented Feb 17, 2015 at 5:28

1 Answer 1

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A friend helped me diagnose the problem. Apparently it was one of the SATA power cables, I tried switching it between storage devices and the one that's powered by that cable is the one that turns off.

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  • Anecdotally, I agree. I've had a SATA cable go bad and I experienced HDD disks suddenly stop being detected mid-operation. This makes Windows and other OS's very unhappy. Rebooting would make the disks re-appear but they would disappear again minutes or hours later. Replaced the SATA cables, and the issue went away.
    – Afforess
    Commented Feb 18, 2015 at 20:51
  • Mine aren't replaceable and I'm using adapters from MOLEX ones, luckily I had another free MOLEX cable so I can use that. And as a last resort I can disconnect the optical drive, I almost never use that.
    – Andrei Sirbu
    Commented Feb 19, 2015 at 20:31

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