Connection problems with external usb 3.0 hard drive

Hi guys,

I have an alienware 15 r1 and I've been having an issue with my external hard drive for quite some time now.
I have quite some videos on my external hard drive (Seagate backup+ 3TB 3.5 inch external hard drive).
This hard drive works perfectly. It's fast, easy to use, however I have one big issue.

When I watch a video that is in my hard drive, the chances are VERY high the hard drive disconnects itself and after a few seconds it's back connected. This only happens when watching videos. But the bad thing is, the disconnection happens while the drive is active, so not very healthy for the hard drive.

So any ideas how I can solve this?

I'll sum up every thing I tried:

- Installed the driver of the hard drive.
- Tried setting the sleep time to 8 hours. also tried to set it to never in the hard drive software.
- Tried using it without the software
- Looked for firmware update for the driver, but there is none.
- Checked in Power option to see if usb sleeping is disabled which it is.
- In device settings disabled every checkbox for each usb port saying. Allow the computer to turn of this device to save power
- Tried to install the USB 3.0 driver for the laptop, but it says it's only for windows 7. (fyi, I'm running on windows 10 now, also had this issue when running windows 8.1)
- I tried using a different video player but that also didn't solve it

Also before this laptop I had an alienware m14x.
I had the very same issue on that laptop however, I installed the usb 3.0 eXtensive host controller on that laptop which was available on the driver website and it solved the problem back then.

I searched for that same driver on the alienware m14x page, installed it, but no luck.
Any suggestions?

I asked dell support, they are always saying the same. Contact the manufacturers of the hard drive.

 

Since it was working on your previous laptop after a driver update, it doesn't sound like a faulty HDD or cable. Your USB ports could be providing insufficient power at times, causing the HDD to be forcefully shut down and disconnected. If you have a powered USB hub, I'd try connecting your HDD to it and check if the symptom persists. Alternatively, if you have a modern router with a USB port, you could turn your HDD into a network drive at the loss of transfer speeds.

 

Well I could always replace the usb 3.0 cable with a USB 2.0 cable, but then I won't benefit from it's speed. And the external harddrive is powered by an adapter. So usb should only be a trigger to wake the hard drive up. It's still plugged into a power socket.

 

hey,
did you check
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answe...xternal-randomly-dropping-usb-connection.html

in order to turn off the power saving mode in
the drive firmware.

 

Yeah I've seen that post earlier. That is a slightly different issue. guy is saying the disconnection can happens while read/write cycles, which is a worse problem then mine.

My problem happens specifically when watching videos. Perhaps an issue with buffering the video. I don't know for sure

Nevertheless I did try setting the option of never going to sleep. Hard drive doesn't go to sleep then, but the issue still happens.