Usb drives vanish and then say they need to be formatted

[Galdorf]

I ave a customer that seems to be having a strange problem she has 2 usb external drives once in a while the drives will vanish then reappear vanish and reappear constantly.
Then the problem goes away for a month really strange tried reinstalling chipset drivers but that does not seem to fix it.
Scanned for virus and malware/rootkits nothing.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

My first question to her would be how does she eject them? If the same thing is happening on 2 drives its either the machine she plugs them into or she isn't ejecting them properly. I'd assume the latter.

 

[Galdorf]

My first question to her would be how does she eject them? If the same thing is happening on 2 drives its either the machine she plugs them into or she isn't ejecting them properly. I'd assume the latter.

No they are plugged in 24/7.

Actually since the last batch of updates for windows i have been having the same problem with my external usb drive i use for backups/images if its not used within a specific period it vanishes as well on vista or windows 7.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Is Power management for the USB hubs set to "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" perhaps?

 

[phaZed]

Is Power management for the USB hubs set to "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" perhaps?

Not saying your wrong, but I believe that windows *should" unmount the drives before powering down the USB hubs.

I would certainly be checking if write-caching is enabled for the USB drives.

 

[FoolishTech]

^ what Larry said.

If not, then I'll throw this into the pot. I have personally owned TWO cheap motherboards in the last few years that exhibit this behavior. If anyone cares, yes they are ASROCK boards

But that aside, the problem with both boards is that they don't provide enough POWER to the USB ports to sustain most USB devices. Sure, mice/keyboards work fine, and flash drives/cameras to an extent.... however the issue occurs sometimes with the drives just sitting there plugged in, and always occurs when copying a lot of files to/from the USB drive. Also, I cannot get a portable HDD (2.5" laptop drive in an enclosure) to even spin up sometimes when connected, and never get one to be recognized by Windows.

I know it's a power issue because in contrast, I can connect a full 3.5" desktop HDD to the USB ports via my Thermaltake BlacX dock (which has an external power adapter plugged into the wall) and I don't experience ANY issue whatsoever, it works as intended every time, even during large file copy operations.

Just something to think about...