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I'm having issues with an external hard drive I use from time to time.

It will connect, but disconnect on its own soon after (5-10 minutes)

I use this as backup for my music, as well as keeping old football games, digital copies of movies, and probably more important than all of that, a place to dump/back up pics.

I'm pretty sure it's not the USB ports, because my wife also has an external, and I connected hers and let a movie run for a good half hour and it stayed connected.

THe weird thing is the data on the drive seems to be fine. A video file starts but only cuts out when the drive does. Music files play fine.

I read up on the internet about troubleshooting but nothing worked. Western Digital's site is an embarrassment as well. I read somewhere that there is a way to fix a partition without losing data. The music is stored on my laptop which would be fine. The football games are easy enough to download, but it would suck to lose pitures tha I have stored from over the years.

Thanks to anyone who can offer help.

Have you tried to connect it to a different computer to see if it disconnects from it as well? That might at least pinpoint it to the device or not.

Is the cord that connects the external drive permanently attached to the drive, or does it unplug from it as well (a USB to USB cord, for example)? If yes, and a generic cord, do you have others you can replace it with to test the cord?

Outside of that, I'm limited in ideas.

Most of what I am finding on this issue is related to USB 3 having a power saving option called selective suspend. Disable that doing this: control panel/power options/change plan settings/change advanced power settings/USB settings /USB selective suspend setting

Barring this, if you have multiple USB ports it is likely they won't all be 3, so you could just try plugging into a 2.0 port.

What all have you tried in terms of trouble shooting?

Since the hard drive is still working, if troubleshooting doesn't work you could buy a new hard drive or find a website to transfer the images to, in case it totally dies on you, you'd have a backup.

Yes, as King said the USB selective suspend must be disabled. If you're a nerd and you check your event viewer, you can likely disregard any errors regarding idleness or anything of that nature.

Best next steps thereafter is as also suggested up top - hook it up to another machine and observe it's behavior.

Yeah I tried the USB selective suspend. Still nothing. Went into device manager and unistalled the USB/scan for hardware change/etc.. Didn't work.

I tried using the cable from my wife's external.. still no dice.

I may grab her laptop and try connecting my hdd. Just to rule out my computer completely.

Seriously appreciate all the feedback.

Lemme see. We can try to trick your computer into recognizing the harddrive as internal and then making it so the drive never stops spinning.

Go to device manager and your disk drives. Right click the external and goto properties. Under Polcies click Turn off Windows write-cache or it will have options for Quick Removal/Better Performance, choose Quick removal.

Go back into the advanced power settings area and try turning off "Turn off hard disk after" - flip that to Never, and see what happens.

It sounds like the harddrive is just going into some kind of sleep mode for some reason. If we force it to keep spinning that should fix the problem.

http://www.eightforums.com/drivers-hardw...inactivity.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/140592-hard-drive-turn-off-hard-disk-after-idle-never.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/10392-write-caching-enable-disable.html

My advice is to start backing it up to something else quick. Sounds like a failure is looming to me.

This is where I'd put my money.

Either the drive or the enclosure is about to poop the bed.

Prp knows a thing or two about systems pooping the bed

lol, all too well.

Yep. Keep it spinning by coping everything to another drive.

I've also taken hard-drives and put them in a bunch of plastic bags and threw them in the freezer a bit if they were getting bad. Shrinks the platters a bit if you are getting head crashes. Then you hurry up and copy everything off.

Thanks for the advice. Unreal that the thing would crap on me after a year. And it's not like it's a device I use every day. It's probably something I plug in once or twice a month to dump pictures and back up my current music library.

The weird thing is the white light is on when it's plugged in, and you can feel the slight vibration of the HDD working. It just seems to cut out after 5-10 minutes.

I need to try another computer just to be sure.

I have a USB drive for backup, but I also automatically backup my computer online to 2 different places, the free Google Drive and One Drive.

I figure the more backup sources, the better.

Maybe a thousand years from now, someone will discover one of my college papers floating around in the ether,and wonder whatever happened to this genius level writer.

lol. you never know.

So if this is a failure, is the device toast, or just the data?

Your enclosure may just be going bad, though that's less likely vs it being the drive itself. If that's the case, you can pop the drive out and hook it up to a PC and get the data.

Back everything up to another drive, then try to do a full reformat and use seagate tools ( SeaTools ) to do a thorough test on the device. If the reformat and seagate tools test come out okay then try using it sparingly until you are sure it is okay.

Most likely though you will find corrupted sectors when reformatting.

Yup, definitely the device. It cut out on my wife's laptop the same way. I tried reinstalling the drivers, but no luck.

Luckily it is still connecting for a few minutes so I'm slowly able to pull off the files that cannot be replaced.

Thanks for the update, the curiosity was on the mind. Be thankful you can backup the files elsewhere though.

This weekend I think I'll spend some time making some backups and dispersing those files amongst some various devices that are in the "nerd room".

Is it solid state or a spinner? If it's solid state you might be able to reformat it and save it. even a spinner might be saved with a reformat if it's just a few bad sectors. Worth a try after everything you want to save is backed up elsewhere.

How do you tell the dif?

Can you hear a disk spinning? Typically SSDs are smaller than Hard Drives. SSD vs HD

Easiest way to tell is to pick it up while it is running. If you feel torque, it is a mechanical drive, not an ssd.

This thing definitely hums, so it's a spinner.

I registered my device, and luckily it is still under warranty. I've got a ticket in with Western Digital right now. If they can't get me to fix this, then I will do an RMA.

Best news is that I have pulled out all the files that can't be replaced.

Look into using something like Google Drive - or some other cloud-based service - to store files that you absolutely cannot lose. They're free up to a certain amount of space A(I htink I get 17GB with Google), and realtively inexpensive to bump up the storage after that. Also, pick up a cheap USB thumb drive and routinely archive the important junk there, then store it in a safe place. You can get a 128GB thumb drive for all of $40... that should be plenty to back up pretty much everything except a movie library.

Of course, if money isn't an issue (lol, right??), look into getting an NAS product that can be networked storage and auto-sync with cloud services, etc, all while acting like your own personal cloud, media center and downloads center.

I need to finally break down and get/build myself a NAS. With my photography over the last couple of years I have an insane amount of data. Right now it all backs up to OneDrive, but it's nice to have it local as well.

I just picked up a used Synology DS411+II (with 7TB of RAID5-equivalent storage) from a former coworker. Got a sweet deal that I couldn't beat even on just the drives alone, but before that, I was leaning heavily toward building a basic machine in a small enclosure - probably with an Atom processor - and then running FreeNAS on it.

Just a small update. I tried reformatting the drive and it still disconnected on its own. I put in for an RMA..

I have to say, that process with Western Digital was quite easy. Once you register the device, it's smooth sailing from there. Pretty cool that I was able to print out the RMA label last night, and I took it this morning to the post office and had it sent out $6.65 for Monday delivery (to CA) with tracking and insurance.

I also got google drive working. I actually had been unknowingly using it. One of the teams I play for keeps a spreadsheet with everyone's phone number on there. Pretty cool that you get 15gb of space. I uploaded my resume on there, just in case I ever needed to forward it to someone on the fly.