My WD Green drives are disappearing from my newly built HTPC!?

Question

I have built an HTPC and everything is running great except for hard drives, can't understand whats wrong.
I had 3 Western Digital 4TB Mybook external drives,
As planned, I opened them up to install inside the PC. All of them are 'WD SATA III Green Drive'
I connected them, and tried to copy my contents over from my back ups.
After an hour or 2 hrs of copying, it says directory unavailable and the new drive disappears from 'This PC', 'Disk Management' and 'Device Manager' as well. But I can see it if I run diskpart from command prompt.
It reappears most of the time after a reboot, always detected from BIOS.
Here are the things I have tried..

I tried formatting it as Dynamic Volume and Simple Volume both, same problem during copying contents.
I tried doing a full format, it disappeared after 28hrs (30% progress)
Checked my SATA III cable and power cable
Swapped SATA III cable and power cable
Switched to a different SATA port.
I ran both simple and extended test with WD LIfeguard app, it passes the test without a problem.
Checked for error with windows tool.
Updated BIOS and all my drivers.
Updated windows (8.1)
Changed sleep timer for HDD from power management to 'never'
Enabled or disabled SMART from bios.

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of is that they have customised firmware for use in the original USB housings, or the drive firmware is simply buggy - drives do occasionally get released with poor firmware and updates are needed to fix the problem.



Check the WD site and see if there are any firmware updates available.

(I'm curious) >google<



Yes - there are firmware updates for some "Mybook" drives that have "issues" and also various other drive models.



See the page below:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1348/~/availability-of-firmware-updates-for-wd-products

Answer 2

Everything failed, my HDD still disappears randomly. To be noted, it only disappears during copying huge contents or during formatting. Looks like it can't take the full blast load.

Also to be noted, it writes at avg. 115 MBps from an external USB 3.0 drive.

Also, always the 'writing to' drive fails, but not the one 'reading from' from!

All 3 of the drives have shown same symptom.



I disabled 'Write Caching Policy' from properties, and copying files to it, it took 18 hrs to copy around 3TB at avg 45MBps transfer rate, and it didn't fail this time (yey)!



They are working now, I can live with this speed, no problem, but I can't live without knowing exactly whats wrong here!

Is it corrupted HDD cache memory?

Is it because green drives has lower RPM?

Is it because the drives are not meant to be used as internal SATA drive?

Is something wrong with my mother board (ASRock FM2A88X-ITX) ?



FYI: My primary boot drive is a 128GB SSD and no issue there at all.



Please help!!

Thank you.

Answer 3

Probably too much load for your power supply. That often causes drives to disappear as they lose power and slow down. The bigger the drive the more likely. And MyBook drives are designed for their own individual power supplies which are far higher powered than any SATA power port.