Hard drive disappears from my computer - Hardware & Software

So I've been having an issue which started earlier today, a couple hours ago actually. When I start up my computer, everything's alright, but after about 10-30 minutes, my E drive, my 1tb hard drive, disappears from my computer. As in, it doesn't show up in device manager, windows explorer, speccy, or anything else. It tends to happen when I try to use steam but I'm not sure if that's just a coincidence. Here are my specs, taken right after I booted my computer up so the hard drive didn't disappear yet Operating System Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1 CPU Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.40GHz 47 °C Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology RAM 8.00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 802MHz (9-9-9-28) Motherboard ASUSTeK Computer INC. P8Z68-V PRO (LGA1155) 29 °C Graphics SyncMaster (1920x1200@60Hz) 1024MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series (ATI) 46 °C Storage 111GB OCZ-AGILITY3 (SSD) 931GB SAMSUNG HD103SJ SCSI Disk Device (SATA) 31 °C <--- The one that disappears Optical Drives DTSOFT Virtual CdRom Device hp CDDVDW TS-H653R Audio Realtek High Definition Audio Could it be that the hard drive is just at the end of it's lifespan? I got it in late 2011 so I figured it had some more time left in it. Looking it up just brought me to dead ends or patches that didn't work. Any help would be appreciated.

I have a similar issue, but the hard drive only disappears if I put more than light load on it (watching a video file is fine, but seeding multiple torrents crashes it). I assume it's dying despite being manufactured in early 2013.

Are there updates for your SATA controller or general mobo chipset/firmware? (A BIOS flash is probably overkill, so don't go that far yet, even if there's an update.) Also, open up control panel, administrative tools, event viewer. Open up the Windows Logs > System log. You're gonna see a ton of useless shit, so we need to filter it (Filter Current Log... on the right pane). In the filter, check critical, warning, and error. If anything seems relevant to your HDD/SATA controller, copy the error message here and also note the Source and Event ID entries. The best time to do this would be after a reboot and [B]right[/B] after your drive disappears, since Windows will generate other warning/error events that are unrelated and mostly harmless.

Welcome to the club known as "people who own drives that dissappear for no reason" If you're lucky it happens just this once time, else you have to kinda get used to it just like I did, but the last time the drive disappeared was almost 2 weeks ago so even when doing nothing it fixed itself.

Yeah I rebooted so that I could post the specs for this and since than it hasn't disappeared again. I guess I'll try what elix said if it happens again.

Try a other SATA cable perhaps. I had a similar issue whenever I wanted to burn a DVD, my disc drive would no longer show up. I grabbed another SATA cable and the problem no longer showed up.