My 14TB Exos internal HDD started restarting itself during more intense reading operations on it. E.g. showing the thumbnails in a folder with 400 JPEGs in it: about 20-70 thumbnails will load, then the HDD makes the noise it makes when the PC boots (i.e. the HDD powers up) and it stops loading them. After it powers up again in a few seconds, the next ~20-70 more thumbnails will load and then it will restart itself again and so on. No data was lost, HD Sentinel shows 100% healthy and all green, the HDD itself is about 9 months old. Changing the SATA slot, SATA cable, or power cable of the HDD did not help.
Initially, I thought the reason was that I installed a USB 3 expansion card on my x1 PCIe slot (using a PCIe extension cable), because the issues started right after I installed it. After removing the expansion card, the issue disappeared. However, a couple days later, the issue reappeared, even without the expansion card.
I also recently installed a second M.2 nVME drive, but I don't see how that could possibly affect the Exos.
Could this be a power issue or something else?
I am using a 400W power supply, which is what is recommended for my GTX1060 GPU. I have also measured how much power my PC drains during intense GPU loads with a smart plug, and it was about 250W peak, which is far from 400, and besides this issue happens when there is almost no load on the GPU. I have two more internal HDDs and two NVMe drives in this PC as well, and several USB peripherals, none of which should drain that much power, even if all are being used at once. The motherboard is ASRock B365M Pro4.
Power Options in Windows are on High Performance and the HDDs are set to never turn off.
No Widnows or drivers updates were performed recently.
Also, the power circuit the HDD is connected to has nothing else on it. I also tried connecting it to a different circuit - same issue. I also tried powering it through a Molex power connector via a Molex to SATA adapter (because Molex can provide more power) - same issue.
I have had this HDD for 280 days now, I was doing these same read-intense operations on it many times and had no issues until now.
Any ideas what's going on?
