Hard Drive Vanishing Act

[wilcopshot]

Hey there. I have 2 SATA HD's on my MOBO.. Work fine. Got 2 PCI SATA expansion slots and 2 drives one on each. One works fine, the other is fine when i boot up the comp. I can access/write data etc except after a certain amount of time and apparently for no real reason it just vanishes from "My Computer" and can not be accessed anymore. If i reboot, fine again. It is F:/ drive and i have no idea what the problem could be. One issue is i picked up the drive cheap because it was oriniginally meant for use in Digital TV recorders. It is a maxtor drive. Their support said that with the serial ATA power connecter adaptor it would work as a normal HD.

Link to PCI SATA card
http://www.dabs.com/uk/Search2/Product+Details.htm?quicklinx=2PNS&searchphrase=sata%20pci

Link to HD
http://www.dabs.com/uk/Search2/Product+Details.htm?quicklinx=3NXJ&searchphrase=maxtor%20200GB

Any ideas anyone?

Runnin windows xp pro sp2 on an athlon 2800. No other issues known to me. My case is crowded, maybe could be an issue.

[edrod13]

Is the other drive that is hooked up to the pci adapter also the same as the Maxtor? Have you googled that model number to see if others have had some issues as well. There is a review posted on the second link you provided where a user had one die very soon on his pc, but purchased a second one of an XBOX that has worked flawlesssly. Last thing that comes to mind would be problems on the particular channel of the pci card so you could swap the drives and see if the other drive starts to vanish or maybe a defective or intermittant sata cable.

** Everything that I have looked at so far states that these drives can be used on pc's but just need to be formatted because they leave maxtor formatted using linux. Swap the ports or maybe try a cable if possible. one last thing that came to mind would be how many drives total including any optical ones are you running and how many watts is your ps putting out. It might be possible that a weak ps could be making the drive spin down. When you restart it spins to the correct operating speed and everything seems normal. Take this with a grain of salt, as these are just things that just come to mind. HTH

[wilcopshot]

A lot to look at. Thanks very much. I'll get to work and open the case up, see what i can do. Cheers for the suggestions!