Power problem? 8TB external hard drive keeps crashing.

Hi guys,

A month ago (03/16/2019) I purchased and started to use an 8TB Seagate Desktop external hard drive with my laptop computer (2018 HP Pavilion 15t-cc500 CTO). I had been backing up my data with 2 different 4TB external hard drives before. I use a 4-port USB hub with on/off power buttons to connect devices to my computer. I now have my 8TB desktop drive connected at all times. A few times when I'd connect one of my 4TB drives to transfer or back up new data, one of the two hard drives would disconnect or become unreadable. This is what would happen:

I would hear a disconnect sound effect, followed by a connect sound effect as if it had instantly reconnected itself. The drive would reappear in my main "This PC" folder but without an icon and often without a drive title, instead just titled "Local Disk E". Upon opening the drive, either it would say the drive was completely empty, or as I browsed the folders, they would appear to have other files and folders, but through further navigation these files and folders would disappear until everything said "this folder is empty." This actually happened occasionally when I was just using my 4TB drives, usually when I had them connected simultaneously, but now it is happening constantly with my 8TB drive. It would usually get fixed if I just rebooted my computer, with or without the drive still connected.

But now upon restart, the drive starts out being connected but through no activity at all, it will spontaneously disconnect, after 1 minute to 10 minutes to 15 minutes. I thought maybe it was a power connection problem because the 8TB drive has to be plugged into the wall as well, and I had been using a surge protector to plug it in, which I thought maybe was giving it less power, so then I tried plugging it in directly to the wall. After many hours of no activity overnight, the drive seems to have remained connected, but I'm not sure this problem is solved. Daily, I use a file sharing/downloading program which connects to all the files in my drive, roughly 300,000 files, and sometimes the drive disconnects when I try to connect to the program, so I don't know if that has anything to do with it. What could the problem be? Can my computer just not handle the power of two large drives, 8TB&4TB connected at once, or even just the 8TB alone is too much? All I want to do is to have my 8TB connected at all times and to occasionally connect one of my 4TB drives to back up and transfer files without one or both of the drives crashing.

after it disconnects and reconnects open the device manager right click on the drive, choose properties, and move over to the events tab.
is that showing any errors?
Your power plan shouldn't be a problem but you can check the advance settings to see what it says under usb.

Event 410 and 400, Source: Kernel-PnP, 03/16/2019. Just the startup of the drive. No errors. How do I check the advance settings to view USB settings? I can view USB bus controllers in Device manager but I don't know if that's what you're referring to.

Even if the drive is working properly, which is most likely so - what do you think about one or both drives crashing when I connect another external drive? That happens often, mainly when I am transferring files.

control panel/ power options/ change plan settings/ change advance power settings/ scroll down the popup
window to usb settings click the + mark to expand usb suspend setting...mine is set to disabled.

TO thomaseg1:

Okay, although by "change plan settings" I think you mean "edit plan settings" as it says in my control panel. Your control panel must have slightly different options.

Anyway, never minding that - so in the menu "USB selective suspend setting"
On battery: Enabled
Plugged in: Enabled

What do you have disabled? What do I want?

TO CountMike:

What do you mean by self powered? I have a Sabrent 4-port USB hub connected to my computer which has power on/off buttons for each port.

Okay, thanks for your help.