The directory of one of my drives keeps getting erased (mysteriously)

I have a new 12 core Ryzen 9 Windows 10 pro desktop system (Gigabyte Auros Master motherboard) with 3 drives. The first (1TB ssd) is partitioned into C,D,E,F. Next is a 4TB SATA drive (G) followed by a 14TB SATA drive (H). All of the drives have been working perfectly for a week except drive G (the 4TB one). I loaded about 200GB of data onto it and then at some point I noticed that all the data is gone. Only $RECYCLE.BIN and System Volume Information remain in the root directory. The first time this happened I thought I must be dreaming, but this happened four times in 1 week! The files themselves appear to be intact. Just the directory appears to have been erased. I know this because I used a utility called recuva which recovers deleted files. I restored at least most of the files to a different drive, although recuva can't recover the directory structure. I checked many of the larger files for integrity and they seemed to be intact. My first instinct was that this is the result of a comptuter virus. However I ran several anti-virus scanners and they all came back clean. Also it would be unusual for a virus to completely erase one drive leaving everything else untouched. After the 2nd time this happened, I removed the volume using computer management and recreated it as NTFS with a quick format (as before). I've seen dozens of hard drives fail in various ways, but never like this. If this is due to a failure of the drive itself it would certainly be unusual (especially since the drive is brand new). The temp sensors indicate that both SATA drives are running at 35C. I'm at a loss of what to try. It's still under warranty, so I could still send the drive back to the shop that assembled the computer, but I'm not sure if it is really a hardware issue. I was thinking of replacing it with an old 300GB SATA drive I have laying around to see if the problem happens with that one, but before I do that I thought I would see if any of you have any ideas for tests to run on my 4TB drive. Thanks ~Paul

"Following are the most common situations in which you might lose your users files or personal documents, pictures, videos, installed programs, games, etc. without notice.
1. Windows 10 automatic upgrade or update (desktop files and installed apps are the most likely to be removed).
2. The virus deleted or hid personal files.
3. You logged in a new user account.
4. The hard drive is failing"
[4 Methods] Files Disappeared and Missing from Hard Drive - EaseUS

In your case may be the last one is applicable. It could also be that your vendor put in a used and corrupted drive.
Give it one more try:
Wipe your 4TB drive clean writing zeros to all sectors. You may use HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool from HDDGURU: HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool
Download Windows Executable (works without installation): HDD Low Level Format Tool ver.4.40. It will be a single executable HDDLLF.4.40.exe . Click on it to run, and make sure you select the correct drive to wipe. ( Make doubly sure that it is not your system drive.)
The advantage here is that you will have a visual text representation of the writing process that will indicate if writes fail in any sector (Bad sectors )
For more details on running the tool see my post #31 here can't access external hard drive

Once complete , initialise the disk as GPT and format it. A quick format will do since you have already wiped the drive clean.
Save some data that you can afford to lose and check whether it disappears as before. If it does, return it to the vendor and get a replacement.

Note: On a 4TB disk writing zeroes to all sectors may take hours. So do it at night.

Thanks jumanji. I'm running the low level format tool now. It's going pretty slow (49.0 MB/s) so it looks like it will take nearly 23 hours. Fortunately I don't have to watch it the entire time :)
~Paul

I am having the exact same problem and the weird thing is that it is also on my G drive only which is a SATA drive. I normally only use that drive to store some insignificant .zip archives, so I have not lost anything important. I have tried many different solutions to no avail, so this morning I deleted the partition and remade it and re formatted it. We will see. Please let me know if you find the solution.

I wonder what would happen if the drive was renamed from G to something else, in light of a confirmation that this aberration happened on a "G" drive.
John

Do you have Google Drive installed as an application? If so it will create a "G" drive for itself. Maybe that is confusing something if you have it installed, and also have "G" assigned manually?

Bobby Phoenix said:

Do you have Google Drive installed as an application? If so it will create a "G" drive for itself. Maybe that is confusing something if you have it installed, and also have "G" assigned manually?

I have a "Google Drive (G:)" also. Where is this drive physically located? It doesn't show up in disk management, WinDirStat, nor as a file on "C:" What I am wondering is if it is using physical space on "C:", and if so, can it be moved to another physical drive?

Thanks, Gary

I do not have Google drive, but that is an interesting scenario

About the only thing that makes sense to me other than drive failure is a RAM failure.

RAM failures manifest in highly unusual ways. About 10 years ago, I had a RAM problem and about 30% of the images I edited in Photoshop Elements were damaged. The bottom half of each image was all solid grey.

I'm thinking that when Windows goes to write a block/sector of data in the directory, failing RAM writes a defective block for both the primary directory and secondary copies it.

So, if reformatting the drive doesn't fix the problem, it might be worth downloading a RAM testing program and let it test for a couple of hours.