HDD Gone From 100% Usage to Inaccessible

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

I have an Asus H97M-PLUS based Win 10 21H2 PC.

 

A few weeks ago one of the Seagate SATA drives attached to the PC kept going to 100% usage. I did run CrystalDiskInfo on it, but it didn't give any reported problems. I assumed still it was faulty, it was several years old and used heavily, so I replaced it with a bigger 6TB Seagate Barracuda (ST6000DM003) drive.

 

A few weeks later and I've spotted the last few days it's been doing the same thing. Sometimes it takes pulling power on the PC to be able to restart it. I've updated the motherboard BIOS to the latest (from 2018). There's an unknown SM Bus driver. Not sure how critical that is but despite downloading drivers from Asus's site I can't seem to find what it is. There's also one other unknown device but that seems to be a mobo temp sensor.

 

Today I spotted that Windows does disk checking every time it starts and says it's fixing this drive. To make matters worse Windows is also saying the drive is inaccessible.

 

Any ideas what could be causing this? There's two other SATA drives on the system, a Samsung SSD system Drive, and another 6TB data drive. There are also three USB drives connected for backup. Suffice to say it's replete with drives, but none of the others are exhibiting this issue.

 

Thanks

[XiJ]

Hi folks,

 

I have an Asus H97M-PLUS based Win 10 21H2 PC.

 

A few weeks ago one of the Seagate SATA drives attached to the PC kept going to 100% usage. I did run CrystalDiskInfo on it, but it didn't give any reported problems. I assumed still it was faulty, it was several years old and used heavily, so I replaced it with a bigger 6TB Seagate Barracuda (ST6000DM003) drive.

 

A few weeks later and I've spotted the last few days it's been doing the same thing. Sometimes it takes pulling power on the PC to be able to restart it. I've updated the motherboard BIOS to the latest (from 2018). There's an unknown SM Bus driver. Not sure how critical that is but despite downloading drivers from Asus's site I can't seem to find what it is. There's also one other unknown device but that seems to be a mobo temp sensor.

 

Today I spotted that Windows does disk checking every time it starts and says it's fixing this drive. To make matters worse Windows is also saying the drive is inaccessible.

 

Any ideas what could be causing this? There's two other SATA drives on the system, a Samsung SSD system Drive, and another 6TB data drive. There are also three USB drives connected for backup. Suffice to say it's replete with drives, but none of the others are exhibiting this issue.

 

Thanks

 

Daft thing: if your power supply sufficient?

 

You might get more info on the SM Bus through the device ID? I think these are normally driven by the chipset drivers.

[Gongalong]

Power supply is a Corsair CX750M (750 Watts). Two of the USB drives have a separate power supply.

 

I've had a look at the hardware ID for the SM Bus and can find various bits of discussion about it. Seems to be a pain for lots of folks! Sometimes driver works, sometimes not.

 

The security info on the drive appears to be scrambled which is why it says it's inaccessible. I've made a couple of attempts at taking ownership but it seems to lock up. I might remove the partition and start over as it's all backed up, then see if the behaviour continues.

[Gongalong]

Found the SM bus driver via a forum post at this link. That's worked. Looks like the other unknown device is a temperature sensor that an ASUS util uses, so presumably nothing to do with drives.

 

I tried multiple times to take ownership of the drive but it didn't work, so I've deleted the partition, recreated, and will be restoring data for the next day or two. Hopefully it doesn't recur!

[bald_pig]

Sounds like a dodgy cable or sata port perhaps?

[Gongalong]

A friend suggested the same thing so I swapped it with the SATA lead to the DVD player, which looks better quality. So far data is restoring without issue.