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Drives disappear after adding new drive

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TomMannPhoto

Technical User
Mar 16, 2022
1
US
(Win 10, everything (ie, OS, all SW & drivers) up to date)

I want to add a couple more drives to the main Win10 box I use for my photography business. It currently has about 6 SSDs & 2 spinners attached and has been working absolutely perfectly. The drives are distributed between internal SATA & external USB 3 connections (thru a powered USB 3 hub since most of the other USB ports are in use for things like mouse, KB, graphic tablets, printers, scanners, card readers, etc.)

One at a time, I attempted to add a couple more SSDs (including an 8 TB internal SATA unit). Initially, each drive installed easily. I assigned an unused drive letter, and then copied a large number (hundreds) of mostly large (~100M - 1G each) image & Photoshop files to each as a test. Everything went well. I spot checked that they opened perfectly, checked the numbers of files copied, file size, & a few CRCs - all ok.

However, after putting the side panels back on & using it for a few hours, first, one of the new drives disappeared, then, after a reboot, the second drive also disappeared. Not only were they gone from the ordinary file explorer, they also disappeared from the drive/ partition manager ( ie, it wasn’t a drive letter conflict). The rest of the computer, including all the old drives & peripherals seem to be working just fine.

I opened the box & checked that none of the connections had become dislodged. I am at a complete loss. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. For example, could I have exceeded a limit on the total power or number of peripherals allowed? Given the large number of things connected to this computer, if I could diagnose the problem without disconnecting everything, it would be wonderful.
 
Generally speaking, you should run out of sata connections before you run out of drive letters AND you can fill up all the sata ports with drives without any issue.

Five things come to mind:
1. When a drive is "missing", does the PC "see" the drive in the BIOS after a reboot?
2. Any BIOS update?
3. Any settings in the BIOS regarding certain SATA ports
4. Power supply issue? Though SSDs don't take much power and that's what you were adding
5. Motherboard/Sata controller issue/failure?

Could you swap ports between a visible and non-visible hard drive to see if the problem follows the port. That would tell you something.
 
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