Intermittent Failure with WD5000AAJS Caviar Blue

Hello,

I am experiencing intermittent failure on this drive.

I have an Asus MB with SATA 6Gb/s controller.

Sata ports 1-4 are set to AHCI mode

Sata ports 5-6 are set to IDE mode

My drives are:

Crucial C300 256Gb SSD on Sata 1 (AHCI)

WD Caviar Blue 500Gb HDD on Sata 5 (IDE)

Lite-On DVD R/W on Sata 6 (IDE)

What happens is that I will boot up and it will take a long time.  Finally get into Windows 7 64-bit and my D drive will be missing (WD Blue)

I will reboot 1-5 times and it will boot fast and the drive will appear.

This was happening on my old MSI motherboard so I bought this ASUS because I figured it was a problem with the SATA controller since the drive doesn’t demonstrate any other issues.

But of course, the new MB and I have the same problem.

I’ve tried the Drive in AHCI and IDE and switched power cable, and SATA cable. 

Atleast with this motherboard, if it is going to fail, I will get a “SATA5 Hard Disk Failure warning on POST screen”

Lifeguard in Windows says all is good with the drive.  I’m performing a long test on it now.

Would you assume that this is a problem on board the HD itself?

Just completed testing.  Took 3 hours and says it passed.

Could the controller on the hard drive be going bad?

Hello,

Have you test the drive using a different computer? Did you get the same behavior.