When I leave the drive attached via a USB3C cable to a USBC3C port on my Windows 10 machine, it appears to go into a low power state. It does not appear in the disk manager. Unattaching and reattaching it to the cable results in an error that the computer does not recognize the USB device. I reboot the machine, and the drive becomes available again. I’ve walked through the Windows Troubleshooting step, but as mentioned, the drive does not show in the disk manager. The indicator light in the front is on, but is in a steady state, ie doesn’t flicker like when the drive is in use. I’ve checked all the power settings for the USB hub, and the drive to ensure that they are not allowed to be put to sleep, but it happens regardless.
Is your computer going to sleep? portable drives are going to be more susceptible to power issues since it has no external power. There might be options within your bios of your motherboard that can enable or change USB power settings as well.
It hasn’t been going to sleep, I disabled that, but I can check the bios settings to disable it at the lower level and see where that get’s me. I’ve done all the fine grain stuff I know to do in the OS, power settings, and device settings in the device manager.
When I come back in the morning it says the disk is uninitialized.
Did you format the drive as exFAT or NTFS? If it is uninitialized then it means the partition would have been corrupted and now it needs to be cleaned. Essentially you would need to reinitialize it and create a partition back to the device.
However if you are having the issues you are with the sleep not being manageable and now being not initialized I would suggest returning the drive to the place of purchase for a replacement.
NTFS. The weird thing is, I reboot the computer and it’s fine. And this only happens when I leave the drive connected over night. The next day when I unplug the drive and reattach it before the reboot, it says the usb device is malfunctioning and that it’s not recognized. After that I reboot, reconnect the drive, and everything’s fine. Really weird.
