Secondary HDD sometime disappear and wont show up until reboot

Well when I say secondary HDD, it is actually another SSD

The same problem happened to me once per few days, until last month the disappeared drive could never show up again after power cycles - my m14x killed a X25-M G2 160GB! Thankfully intel replaced the SSD for me (and I lost all data). The new one still occasionally disappear, reboot does not help, I have to power the system down and restart to make it recognise the drive.

Interestingly, kaspersky recognise the drive as a portable usb drive rather than internal SATA drive. Would you guys think this is because of some power management program take the power away from the secondary drive after idle? Or am I having a defective motherboard?

Any suggestion is appreciated.

 

I'm bumping this old thread as it is the only thing closely related to my problem.

On my Alienware 14 I have a SSD in the main bay and a HDD (the stock 750GB Western Digital that usually comes with these systems) in the secondary bay in a caddy where the optical drive goes.
Last night while running on my battery, I was saving images casually and noticed the last saved location had moved for some reason. I tried to navigate to it but my drive D:/ (this Western Digital drive) was missing from my computer. I checked in Disk Management and the drive was completely MIA. A reboot caused the drive to reappear.

Somethings to note are that this is a recent reformat and the first time on this Alienware 14 that I'm running this kind of SSD + HD combo. I've ran this same styled setup on my previous two Alienware's (m15x and m14x) without any problem.

Any clues? Thanks ahead of time for any help.

 

I've tried changing the power settings to never turn off the hard drive while both plugged in and on battery mode yet this is still happening.

 

Did it happen only once?

 

I have an Alienware M14x R1 and my setup is also an SSD for main storage and OS, and the HDD that came with it as the secondary storage. I was also experiencing the issues of the hard drive disappearing, or going to sleep. It would happen with no rhyme or reason. I would restart my laptop and it would be normal for a little while. Power settings made no difference at all.

I think it's that somehow the hard drive just wants to go to sleep on its own and never wake up until a reboot.

My solution so far is to download and run this program called, "KeepAliveHD" https://keepalivehd.codeplex.com/. Configurating it was easy for me. All it does is write at a text file on your HDD. I set it to write every minute and for the pass couple of days haven't had my Hard Drive go to sleep or standby mode.

I hope this helps. I noticed this was asked in 2011. lol!

PS: If the site dev implemented this then thank you! I closed tab after writing all this, and was restored. lol

 

Are you using an aftermarket caddy? It could be the reason. I had bought a very bad quality caddy before, and the hdd/ssd I installed in it sometimes disappears, sometimes shows up as SATA II. So I got my self another one (not any specific one, as there isn't any "high quality one" on the market, I guess it's just luck), and it's running perfectly for months.

 

I'd think the same thing. I've had this issue in the past and it turned out to be a bad SATA cable. The caddy could easily be the culprit.