Bad hard drives or onboard SATA controller?

jhatfie

jhatfie

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 19, 2003
Messages
1,642
I am having some problems. My system crashes during games, mostly freezing, hiccups, sound loops and sometimes crashing to desktop. All other programs are fine and produce 0 errors. I am running a Shuttle AN50R with the onboard Silicon Image 3112 SATA controller and 2 Hitachi 80GB 7k250 SATA drives.

Now I am getting all kinds of error messages when playing these games. Sometimes it says my SI3112 SATA controller is timing out. Mostly is says there is a "An error
was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation." type error. It is complaining about both drives. So at first I thought it may be a defective Silicon Image SATA controller. So per Hitachi I did their Drive fitness test to test the drives. Both said they had bad sectors. So per Hitachi I went to erase the drive and repair the sectors, but it said there was component failure on either drive if I tested them.

Now I find it pretty weird that both brand new drives would have the same kind of failure problem. And why would they work perfect for all programs like encoding, ripping and just error out on games. My PCMark02 score is like 2200 with them in raid0.

To be sure I've tried about 20 various drivers, reinstalled windows XP about 10 times, tried 1 drive at a time, raid0 and raid1 all with the same results. When running the drive fitness test I disabled the raid function and tried the controller both disabled and enabled with the same results.

Any advice as to what product might be bad or could it just be a incompatability between the SI3112 and the Hitachi hard drives?
 
damn dude... sorry to hear that... i dont have any answers for ya... so bump for ya.. that dose sound odd.. could it be your cables?

thore
 
Maybe you'll have better luck in Data Storage, the realm of HDs/SATA/raid/etc.

Paging Mr. Ice Czar if it's not past your bedtime already. :p
 
Just a couple other things I've tried. I've tried different ram, Both can run Memtest86 without errors, Prime95 runs error free as well. I tried a beta si3112r driver supplied by Shuttle that did not work either along with several other versions. I've tried different cables, one hard drive at a time, different nforce chipset drivers. All kinds on bios settings. I'd try my drives in my other computer, but it is a 8rda+ that does not support SATA. All my testing was done at default bios speeds, so no overclocking when I got the errors.
 
got to thinking about it... could it be a psu issue?... not enought power from a cheap psu??? whats psu are you running?

thore
 
I'm running a 480W Thermaltake Purepower. The voltages are rock solid even when overclocking the CPU and 9800 PRO. I could try swapping it out for my spare Allied 450W truepower to see if it makes a difference, but I am pretty sure the PSU is okay. It worked flawlessly in my other rig before i moved it over to this one.
 
Think I found the cuplrit accidentally. When doing all my testing, changing cables and what not, I somehow cracked the poly top on my whitewater block forcing me to remove my watercooling. After making sure everythign was dry, clean and safe, I re-installed once again and my problems were magically gone. I think the close proximity of my pump to the SATA cables may have been causing some slight interference. I'll verify later when I get my watercooling going again.
 
damn... hell of a way to find out thow... at least it didnt take any thing with it...

thore
 
After some further testing, I am still getting some HDD port and disk paging errors, but only 1/30th as many as before and my freezing and crashes have not come back...yet. I wonder if the SATA controller is just a little flakey and the interference just exaggerated the issue.
 
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