Vista freezes when e-sata drive speeds up or down

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DarkenReaper57

2[H]4U
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Oct 2, 2003
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Hello everyone,

I've tried Googling this situation, but so far I haven't come across a solution. I have an e-sata external drive attached to my laptop. When the spindle speeds up or down when I access the drive, windows vista (64-bit business) temporarily freezes and the display driver reloads. While vista recovers, it is very annoying, especially when playing a movie from the external drive.

I've put the power mode to always on for HD's, but I'm not sure if this applies to external HD's. Either way, it doesn't solve the problem.

Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!
 
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Looking under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in device manager, Intel (R) ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller is listed. My laptop has a combo USB/e-sata port that I use (using e-sata). I'd imagine this would be the right controller to get a new driver for, right?

Also, just for reference, the laptop is a MSI GT627-218US.

Thanks hvrt, but I don't think it is a Jmicron port.
 
I have this IDENTICAL issue.
When I access the drive it spins up, Vista freezes for a couple seconds, display driver crashes and recovers.
Tried also leaving power on all the time for the SATA drives without luck.

Motherboard is AsRock P45R2000-WiFi
1TB drive inside macally G-S350SUA enclosure.

Intel(R) ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller
Driver Date 4/20/08
Driver Version 8.1.0.1001

Updated from Windows Vista 64 Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. Still same problem
 
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Was thinking the same thing. Went to the site, downloaded, installed, came back, and was going to post the download link to try, and you're already on it ;-)

Unfortunately, my computer seems to only do it when sitting for a while or at random times. So, I will post back in a few days.

Thanks for the help on this.
 
Well I don't seem to have the crashing anymore. I updated my Lan, and Audio drivers while I was at it.

However, I still have problems where If the drive has been sitting, I access it, the drives spins up, Vista/Win 7 freezes for a couple seconds, then the drive is online and computer is good again.

An interesting find which could be a problem was found here:
http://stevenharman.net/blog/archiv...ms-my-esata--sata-ii-enclosure-wont-play.aspx

The guy had a Vantec NexStar 3 drive. Vantec support told him
"The SATA II spec calls for some very fast transfer speeds which in turn require a very strong signal between the controller and the drive. However, many of the early SATA II compliant controllers don't produce a strong enough signal to overcome the loss that occurs when connecting to a drive through multiple SATA cables plus the SATA to eSATA bracket as I was using."

The solution was to set the drive to SATAI.
 
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I changed the setting for the hard drive to sleep after the default of 20 minutes to never sleep. Now everything works 100%! Wonder if there is a way to select the option per hard drive somewhere?

Had Vista Ultimate 64 SP2, now have Windows 7 Ultimate 64, was experiencing same problem on both. Updated drivers fixed the crashing, and sleep off stopped the spinup from stting.
 
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