Hard Drives Disappeared

[ronbo613]

I just watched two of my internal storage drives disappear from my computer. I have seven in my system, well, five now. What's going on here? Bad SATA channel? I'm going to have a look but I thought I'd ask here while I take the computer apart.

Edit: Never mind, jiggled a few wires and it's OK. Good for an morning scare though.

 

[Elixer]

Could also be failing HDs, they usually vanish like that...
Make backups just in case.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Having to jiggle wires could be a sign that new cables are in order or a complete reseating is needed, especially if there's a lot of vibration.

 

[CorsairDemon]

Agree with PuffnStuff, check your cabling and try different sata cables/power etc.

 

[ronbo613]

Could also be failing HDs, they usually vanish like that...
Make backups just in case.

To have two hard drives disappear within minutes of each other, especially when I was just using them was very strange indeed and provided a brief, but scary moment. Two hard drives gone, a 4TB and 2TB, would be a lot of lost data. I am a firm believer in backups and do have them, but it would still be a PITA to replace everything.

After a moment of panic, I checked under the hood and switched cables from working drives. When I rebooted a couple times, the drives were back on line so it's something other than defective drives. My system is getting pretty old and it's well used, so a SATA channel or mobo failure would not be totally unexpected. Some kind of software glitch also a possibility.

Anyway, I'm thankful that everything is OK(for now at least). I'm glad I have backups and I'm reminded once again how much data you can lose at one time with large capacity hard drives.

 

[Shmee]

What does SMART say?