SATA HDD stuttering on reads (LED on)
- by jdehaan
I hope I can get some new ideas to solve the issue. What I have:
AMD Phenom II X4 905e Box, Sockel AM3
Gigabyte GA-MA790XTA-UD4, AMD 790X, AM3 ATX
WD Caviar GreenPower 1,5TB SATA II
4GB Kit OCZ DDR3 PC3-10666 Platinum Low-Voltage CL7
HIS HD 4670 iSilence4 DDR3 1024MB Native HDMI Dual-DVI, PCI-Express
Behavior: Everything works normally excepting the HDD accesses. The drive seems to get stuck in reading data (LED drive by Mainboard is on for a while) then recovers and goes on. There is a delay of more than 30s sometimes. Often it is a matter of 5-10s. This does not seem related to the workload of the disk.
What I tried so far:
Use different SATA port: I switched from the SATA3 to SATA2 then the SATA driven by the CPU, no difference.
Turned AHCI off, drove the SATA in IDE mode, same behavior, now I felt like the HDD has problems
Deactivated energy saving settings (BeQuiet, ...), disabled 3 CPUs (msconfig) supposing some race condition or trouble with changing freqs, same trouble
With Windows7 Professional 64Bit, I installed the hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B976418&x=8&y=9 with no success. The problem description matches what I experienced, so I felt lucky but was quite in a sad mood after being deceived.
Burned the DLG 5.04f DataLifeGuard CD from WD to check the drive. All tests passed, to my surprise!
Installed an Ubuntu on the same drive i386 flavour. Drive still in IDE mode, exactly the same behavior. So the OS does not matter.
What I did not try yet:
http://www.gigabyte.eu/Support/Motherboard/BIOS_Model.aspx?ProductID=3263 I have a F2 BIOS and there is a F3a Beta, did someone have similar issues that were solved by this update? It is a beta so I fear upgrading a bit and I could find no release notes at all on the net, not really serious work maybe they had issues translating from Chinese???
Using another HDD drive
Does someone have other hints or a similar issue? Maybe it is neither the HDD nor the Mainboard/BIOS?
