HDD fitness

Also, are you comfortable with trying to run a "Live CD" of some Linux distribution, like Slax or Knoppix?

I'm asking because there are some amazing command-line tools like hdparm to set things like accoustic management (head seek speed VS noise), power saving timers, etc.

But it's a bit dangerous also so only try if you have backups away from the computer.
 
No, I don't get shutdowns with this system. I only got one free one time, and another when I was doing that HDD test.

I have now disabled "sleep" for hibernate.

I wil have to get a PCIe flexible adapter so I can use a PCIe SATA card. My free PCIe slot is below the GPU fan and I can't put a card there as I should. And I need more SATA slots.

If possible I wouldn't like to mess with Linux, only for emergencies.
 
How about spare old parts?
All you'd need is something like an Athlon XP or a comparable Celeron, 0.5-1GB RAM, and a compatible motherboard with a SATA II chipset (do not go with SATA I).
Some power supply, and you're up and running those big drives on-demand from your closet or something.

Thus far it seems you did the right things.
 
Nothing like that, unfortunately. Long are the days when I updated to new mobo or cpu because things got very slow.

Mobos lived short lives with me, and for some time some HDDs too. I'm now trying to find a new, more reliable way to power my computer, if possible not depending from AC. I am not absolutely sure there's not something there, because I can't make my mobos get older and replaceable, they die before serving all they had to.

In the time my wife had her laptop, I must have replaced 5 mobos or so. Pity laptops are so limited for my use. In fact I got what should be a top laptop, an Asus N56J, for me now, but I'm not sure if it will do all I need.

To start with I got a Cyptowall infection a few days after buying it, and it didn't make much harm because I was not home, or it might have. The other bad thing is that it doesn't accept Windows 7, and it comes with 8. The infection got me when I looked for ways to make it look like 7.

Anyway, I would need an expensive external box to handle all my 3.5" HDDs with it. It doesn't even have a SATA interface.
 
Sounds like you would benefit from an on-line topology UPS. As opposed to the more common line-interactive or offline units.

They are quite expensive, but they use double conversion (crappy AC-> DC buffer -> clean sine wave AC) so you don't have to deal with poor quality voltage.

In essence they provide total isolation.

Sorry if I missed it but what power supply do you have in there? make and model?

Need any further help with hashcheck?
 
To start with, the supply I am using now is an EVGA 750 G2, which is considered one of the best, if I'm not wrong.

Quite expensive is not an option for me, so a PS that regenerates the AC is out. Which is my second choice?

Today I started transferring things to my 3TB HDD, leaving the original HDDs with the files as backups.
Unfortunately I had a freeze event again. I don't know when, because I left the thing copying and went out. When I came back frozen it was.

How can I find out what is causing the freeze? It may not be the 3TB HDD at all, as I had one some weeks ago, and the 3TB was not connected. Today, when it froze, the 4TB was not connected either, so I think I have to look for the problem somewhere else. Where should I start at?
 
Bottom line: Keep your drives cool :cool: and they will last.....

....a very, very long time.

I've been doing this for 30 years and it always plays out the same every time regardless of the brand of the drive.

Secondly, it sounds like a bunch of you would benefit from Stablebit Scanner (and/or their Drivepool product)

I run a 78TB single chassis box that does not get backed up. I run Scanner on top of Drivepool and whenever I get any SMART errors scanner automatically moves all data off the drive and I simply RMA the drive. (I've only had to do it on one drive in almost two years and the drive really was "fine" and realistically probably would have lasted years more..)

I feel pretty safe.

It's not data that "needs" to be backed up but it would suck to lose any so this is an OK compromise IMO....and if I do lose 4TB it can be replaced. (there are 24 4TB drives in this chassis)

I have other systems for my data that must stay safe.

Just my two cents....

~RF
 
Yesterday I had another freeze situation using the 4TB HDD. But as I had had another freeze before that using the 3TB, I'm starting it might be a bug in how this mobo handles large HDDs, on the driver itself.

To start with I started to do some tests, to see if it was some other kind of problems, even a problem in the hardware itself. So I left the PC on for a long time just with the SSD, which I use as C. For the time it was on I didn't get any freezes.

The next thing I will do is to copy part of the data I use on the large HDDs to up to 2TB drives, and see what happens in long times on..

I'm pretty sure this situations such as freezes may be difficult to identify, isn't it?

Please do suggest ways to test other things that might cause freeze, even if it's hardware. It might be a memory stick problem or a mobo problem or a CPU problem.

I'm open to suggestions on how to proceed.
 
carlmart said:
One thing I found intriguing that I read yesterday, when looking for formatting large HDDs, was disks alignment, which I wasn't aware of such a thing.

Apparently this is a critical issue in large HDDs, but may also benefit less large ones too.

It did correct with software, but I think I will look for this question again and get back here.

In the meantime, I still do not know what to think if this "revived" HDD, as I described above.
Click to expand...

This is because large hard drives use 4096 byte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors. It is possible to find this out but it is not easy. You can get same model harddrives with either option. Since it is hard to know which option the hard drive uses, it is on the safe side to assume the drive uses 4096 byte sectors and waste afew megabytes on terrabyte hard drives and align them to the boundary . Many drives uses this internally and present themselves as 512byte sectors and do the translation itself. The problem here is, if the sectors are not aligned, as happens because NTFS clusters default to 4096 byte blocks. if that falls in between this and not on a boundary the drive has to read 2 sectors, make changes and write it out, slowing down your reads and drastically affecting write performance. The SSD alignment thing uses much larges page sizes but we dont know where this boundary is and they guess. The hit is larger but also more infrequent. If someone knows how to find this with SSD let us know. But it will also depend on the size of the SSD and number of nands used inside. I have not noticed any difference in speeds with SSD's and alignment but with hard drives you can see the effect.

Another thing to note here that with new SMR recording and you dont align it to the correct boundary will drop your write speeds by over 50% which on top of the huge penalty that SMR itself takes. You can find same model hard drives using PMR or SMR technology as well and they dont tell you this and it is as hard as with SSD's to get info on it.
 
carlmart said:
Yesterday I had another freeze situation using the 4TB HDD. But as I had had another freeze before that using the 3TB, I'm starting it might be a bug in how this mobo handles large HDDs, on the driver itself.

I'm open to suggestions on how to proceed.
Click to expand...

Its a software problem. Your hard drive is going to sleep and cant get back up. Unlike being able to wake up. See if in power options you have a time set for sleep. Some hard drives go to sleep by default and you have to set it so it dont sleep. I found out depending on which command is used for sleep, the drive will not wake up. Programs like hddisconnect (as in using the remove drive option with USB pen drives also work on hard drives), hdsleep and hdstandby send different commands to the drive to go into power save modes. Some modes the drive cant recover from. With my toshiba drive I cant use HDsleep, but HDstandby works as well as hd disconnect so I can have the drive powerdown like I am going to remove the drive and then send a command to wake it up without disconnecting and reconnecting it again, takes much longer to wake up but no lockup. HDsleep on the other hand locks it up. But seagate dont have a problem with this.

I saw a later message saying it also locked up while copying files so this is not a sleep down problem but could be a heat issue.. Are you checking the drive temp? as temp increases the transfer speed slows down and it might stop or crash. The temp depends on the drive since I had a 1.5tb seagate that hit 70C and worked fine and stay above 60C when working no matter what. Put a huge heatsink on it so it worked for a few years. before I realized this, i had been copying a drive and came back to see the computer locked but did not realize it was the temp as rebooting and continuing the copy worked. Now I dont leave the computer alone when copying but keep a tab on the temp and stop once it hits above 55C.
 
Last edited:
carlmart said:
The NAS box, which I have considered but find yet too expensive, would be close to the computer.

I already use a Mede8er media player by the TV, cable networked, so as not to have any noises there.

Interesting this hashcheck program. Is that the name of it or are there several types?

If I'm not wrong, all the HDD are configured in the way you say. as when I call some file on the series or film drives, it takes a few seconds to activate. That's why I think the problem with the 3Tb drive was not hardware related. Just the HDD not being too good.
Click to expand...

Can you post the smart data from the seagae 3TB? You might also run HDDScan and check to see if it has spin down timer set. There are 2 places you can set this, on the drive itself or in the program like when the computers puts the drive to sleep. I have only seen hddscan v3.3 show you this value in the selection -> features->ide Features and the window to set the time and enable spindown, idle timer etc..
 
To be clear, the problem is happening only when a larger than 3TB is connected, and it started to happen when the whole capacity was used with no partition.

I don't think temps are the problem, because I have watched the temps and they are well within the normal ones, quite below their limits.

Just as an example, I left the computer running overnight, just with the 4TB on, besides the SSD, and doing nothing, and this morning it was frozen.

Here's the data from the 4TB:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskInfo 6.3.2 Shizuku Edition (C) 2008-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
Date : 2015/06/03 8:34:18

-- Controller Map ----------------------------------------------------------
+ ATA Channel 4 (4) [ATA]
- ST2000DM001-1CH164 ATA Device
+ ATA Channel 5 (5) [ATA]
- ATAPI iHAS120 6 ATA Device
+ Intel(R) 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller - 1C02 [ATA]
+ ATA Channel 0 (0)
- Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB ATA Device
+ ATA Channel 1 (1)
- ST4000VX000-1F4168 ATA Device
- ATA Channel 4 (4)
- ATA Channel 5 (5)

-- Disk List ---------------------------------------------------------------
(1) Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB : 500,1 GB [0/0/0, pd1] - sg
(2) ST4000VX000-1F4168 : 4000,7 GB [1/1/0, pd1] - st
(3) ST2000DM001-1CH164 : 2000,3 GB [2/2/0, pd1] - st

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(2) ST4000VX000-1F4168
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : ST4000VX000-1F4168
Firmware : CV13
Serial Number : ********
Disk Size : 4000,7 GB (8,4/137,4/4000,7/4000,7)
Buffer Size : Desconhecido
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 7814037168
Rotation Rate : 5900 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ACS-2
Minor Version : ACS-3 Revision 3b
Transfer Mode : SATA/300 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 631 horas
Power On Count : 34 vezes
Temperature : 29 C (84 F)
Health Status : Saudável
Features : S.M.A.R.T., 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : ----
AAM Level : ----

-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
ID Cur Wor Thr RawValues(6) Attribute Name
01 112 _99 __6 000002987A48 Read Error Rate
03 _92 _92 __0 000000000000 Spin-Up Time
04 100 100 _20 0000000000E2 Start/Stop Count
05 100 100 _10 000000000000 Reallocated Sectors Count
07 _53 _52 _30 0006001537EF Seek Error Rate
09 100 100 __0 000000000277 Power-On Hours
0A 100 100 _97 000000000000 Spin Retry Count
0C 100 100 _20 000000000022 Device Power Cycle Count
B8 100 100 _99 000000000000 End-to-End Error
BB 100 100 __0 000000000000 Reported Uncorrectable Errors
BC 100 100 __0 000000000000 Command Timeout
BD 100 100 __0 000000000000 High Fly Writes
BE _71 _57 _45 00001D1B001D Airflow Temperature
BF 100 100 __0 000000000000 G-Sense Error Rate
C0 100 100 __0 00000000000B Power-off Retract Count
C1 100 100 __0 0000000000E2 Load/Unload Cycle Count
C2 _29 _43 __0 00170000001D Temperature
C5 100 100 __0 000000000000 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 100 100 __0 000000000000 Uncorrectable Sector Count
C7 200 200 __0 000000000000 UltraDMA CRC Error Count

-- IDENTIFY_DEVICE ---------------------------------------------------------
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
000: 0C5A 3FFF C837 0010 0000 0000 003F 0000 0000 0000
010: FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF 5056
020: 0000 0000 0004 4356 3133 2020 2020 5354 3430 3030
030: 5658 3030 302D 3146 3431 3638 2020 2020 2020 2020
040: 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 8010 4000 2F00
050: 4000 0200 0200 0007 3FFF 0010 003F FC10 00FB 0110
060: FFFF 0FFF 0000 0007 0003 0078 0078 0078 0078 0000
070: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 001F 850E 0004 004C 0040
080: 03F0 001F 346B 7D61 4133 3469 BC41 4133 207F 00F3
090: 00F3 0000 FFFE 0000 8080 1000 0000 0000 2710 0000
100: BEB0 D1C0 0001 0000 0000 0000 6003 0000 5000 C500
110: 7AF6 0CA8 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 409E
120: 409C 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0029 BEB0
130: D1C0 BEB0 D1C0 2020 0002 0140 0100 5000 3C06 3C0A
140: 0000 003C 0000 0008 0000 0000 05FF 0280 0000 0000
150: 0008 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 7000 8008
160: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0002 0000
170: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
180: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
190: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
200: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 10B9 0000 0000 4000
210: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 170C 0000 0000
220: 0000 0000 107E 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
230: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
240: 0000 0000 0000 0003 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
250: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 EEA5

-- SMART_READ_DATA ---------------------------------------------------------
+0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7 +8 +9 +A +B +C +D +E +F
000: 0A 00 01 0F 00 70 63 48 7A 98 02 00 00 00 03 03
010: 00 5C 5C 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 04 32 00 64 64 E2
020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 05 33 00 64 64 00 00 00 00 00
030: 00 00 07 0F 00 35 34 EF 37 15 00 06 00 00 09 32
040: 00 64 64 77 02 00 00 00 00 00 0A 13 00 64 64 00
050: 00 00 00 00 00 00 0C 32 00 64 64 22 00 00 00 00
060: 00 00 B8 32 00 64 64 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 BB 32
070: 00 64 64 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 BC 32 00 64 64 00
080: 00 00 00 00 00 00 BD 3A 00 64 64 00 00 00 00 00
090: 00 00 BE 22 00 47 39 1D 00 1B 1D 00 00 00 BF 32
0A0: 00 64 64 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 C0 32 00 64 64 0B
0B0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 C1 32 00 64 64 E2 00 00 00 00
0C0: 00 00 C2 22 00 1D 2B 1D 00 00 00 17 00 00 C5 12
0D0: 00 64 64 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 C6 10 00 64 64 00
0E0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 C7 3E 00 C8 C8 00 00 00 00 00
0F0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
100: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
110: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
120: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
130: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
140: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
150: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
160: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 82 00 75 00 00 7B
170: 03 00 01 00 01 FF 02 F9 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
180: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 07 09 09 09 09 07 09
190: 09 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00
1A0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 4F D4 1A 88 11 02 00 00
1B0: 00 00 00 00 01 00 20 18 8D 1C F0 C8 02 00 00 00
1C0: 2C 64 00 8D 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1D0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 DD 03 00 00 01 00 00 00
1E0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1F0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 14 14 00 00 00 9E

-- SMART_READ_THRESHOLD ----------------------------------------------------
+0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7 +8 +9 +A +B +C +D +E +F
000: 01 00 01 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 00
010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 04 14 00 00 00 00
020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 05 0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
030: 00 00 07 1E 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 09 00
040: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0A 61 00 00 00 00
050: 00 00 00 00 00 00 0C 14 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
060: 00 00 B8 63 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 BB 00
070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 BC 00 00 00 00 00
080: 00 00 00 00 00 00 BD 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
090: 00 00 BE 2D 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 BF 00
0A0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 C0 00 00 00 00 00
0B0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 C1 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0C0: 00 00 C2 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 C5 00
0D0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 C6 00 00 00 00 00
0E0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 C7 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0F0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
100: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
110: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
120: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
130: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
140: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
150: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
160: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
170: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
180: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
190: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1A0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1B0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1C0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1D0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1E0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1F0: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 87
 
Well, the freeze problem is definitely related with the large Tb HDDs. This morning I had three freezes with the 4Tb connected, doing nothing and with no heat issue.

Please give me options on how to proceed. It's not a cable problem, and I think it's not a drive issue either.

My guess is a driver issue or something related to it. I don't quite get the solutions you suggest or if any of you had similar issues.
 
OK. this time freeze happened with no large Tb HDD on.

So I think it may be related, as someone mentioned, to some HDD going to sleep, and my first guess, as it controls the system, is the SSD itself: a Samsung 840.

AFAIK, I did set it right, but as this never happened before on any other Windows 7 installation I did, even with SSDs, I wonder what I may be doing wrong or if it is a combination of things: hardware and software. That is some piece of my hardware may be malfunctioning.

How should I proceed to test things and look for the problem?
 
Do not have Samsung Magician running. If it's running, exit it. If it has a shortcut in the Windows Startup Items folder, delete it. It does not need to be running for its settings to be applied, and it's known to cause issues when left running.
 
OK, I uninstalled Samsung Magician completely.

What else should I do?

The first freeze I had, some days ago, I hadn't yet installed SM and was looking for the freeze reasons.

The SSD going into hibernate could be one, but I wasn't sure I had set it right for not going into sleep. That's when I installed SM. And now I'm having freezes quite often.
 
In Windows 7, you can disable hibernation entirely, and most desktop users would probably want to (it's more of a laptop thing):
Open the Start Menu, in the search line, type CMD
Right click CMD icon that comes up and choose "Run as administrator"
Type powercfg -h off and press enter
 
Hmm...That sounds like an awfully familiar thing. I had a less than a year old Mushkin SSD that would randomly disappear (shut off) and it would require a full power off or the SSD wouldn't come back. Then one day poof, it disappeared and never came back. There were 0 issues reported on the SSD. I highly recommend if you have important files on your SSD, do a full backup of it ASAP.

You can test it if you have a spare drive around the same size as the SSD or larger, make a SSD drive image backup and restore it to the spare drive, remove the SSD and replace it with the spare drive. If you can do your tests using the spare drive in place of the SSD with no issues, then replace the SSD it's going to die on you at some point and it will be sudden and unrecoverable.
 
carlmart said:
To be clear, the problem is happening only when a larger than 3TB is connected, and it started to happen when the whole capacity was used with no partition.
Click to expand...

You posted info from a 4TB and a 2TB drive to debug a 3TB drive. I dont think that would work..
 
carlmart said:
OK, I uninstalled Samsung Magician completely.

What else should I do?

The first freeze I had, some days ago, I hadn't yet installed SM and was looking for the freeze reasons.

The SSD going into hibernate could be one, but I wasn't sure I had set it right for not going into sleep. That's when I installed SM. And now I'm having freezes quite often.
Click to expand...

Did you buy the SSD used? Did you set some value on the SSD like setting it to power save mode etc? I know samsung has some very advanced power saving modes which other drives dont so it draws very low power of less than 50ma. I would think a reflash of the bios and reset would clear it to default settings. I have a smilar problem with my crucial ssd which takes a second to start up when I do something even though I have set it to full throttle. I was playing around with it and I never noticed these brief pauses after I dont use the computer before. There was quite a problem with using NTFS compression on the drives. Although it is not supposed to affect things, IT DOES, I was getting 5-10 sec freezes when I used opera and clicking on a new page that was cached. It uses a few hundred very small files and reading and decompressing them and then displaying them from the ssd cache slowed it down. I tried to get rid of NTFS compression and that fixed it for the most part but I still find ntfs compressed files once in a while. Just goes to show you that if your system works great, dont go screwing with it. I could reinstall everything and start form scratch but would take too long and i dont remember all the stuff I need. So I keep debugging slowly and find problems to fix. I went to speed up my system and ended up slowing it down. Also remember the CPU also goes to low power mode among other things and it all takes time to wake up. Maybe you should try to turn off all power saving modes for everything and see if things work. I think default windows sets things for high performance. But BIOS also has things like speed step which puts the cpu into low power states etc so you also have to turn that off.
 
Well, you may have been right about Samsung Magician, which I uninstalled. Or it seems so.

The computer stayed on during the night and no freeze.

Let's see if it doesn't happen again, at least the way it did yesterday, with several freeze events one after the other.
 
I will try to answer to some of the questions you made, that I found after I wrote my comment on not having freeze events overnight.

1) Yes, I did buy the 500Gb Samsung SSD new and on its sealed box.

2) This install was not the first time I used it. I had bought it to try an SSD on my wife computer. At the time I was using a 250Gb Crucial SSD on my desktop, and I was very pleased. The idea was to see if the Samsung SSD improved things on the laptop, and move it to my desktop, replacing the Crucial, which would go to the laptop. As I now bought an Asus laptop for me, I'm planning on putting the Crucial there instead. But I will put an SSD on my wife's.

3) The second use for the Samsung was for taking the data I needed when I went to the US, to put on the laptop I was going to buy. Unfortunately it was also infected by Cryptowall, and I had to reformat it.

4) When I came back to Brazil, my mobo was not working, so I bought a simpler Asus H61 mobo that would accept my LGA1155.

5) I installed Windows 7 as I always did, on the Samsung SSD, and I didn't alter any default issues. Only did block Windows updates, as since XP I have proved some updates (don't know which) make some older programs I use not to work as they should. That did solve those problems.

6) I think Windows 7 did set hibernation for all HDDs except C. Does it do that as default? I did perceive that when I try to open some file on the HDDs it took it few things and you could listen to the HDD start running. That was different on the SSD, where files responded instantly. I did think hibernation on the HDDs might prolong its life and be a good thing for them.

7) I didn't have any problems with the Crucial, and I was thinking of trying it as C on this system, and also a regular HDD. But I'm not still sure the Samsung has any problems and should be ditched, that is RMAed.
 
Well trying to find the problem is difficult in situations. So the ssd had an infection but not the motherboard. Is the motherboard UEFI capable and did you set it to boot as UEFI? It will boot with MBR if it can not find a UEFI boot or you select which drive you want to boot it from. Originally when I got my 3TB drive, it was in an external USB box and I moved it to the computer.. I had to repartition it to get it recognized but some programs locked up because they could only work with 2TB drives. Repartitioning it as 2+1 had the problem of anything written to the +1Tb area trashed data in the 2TB area and locked up the machine. Did not get a chance to check and such because I wiped the hard drive and repartitioned the drive as GPT and a 1.5+1.5TB drive.. It seems to work find after that. The drive itself was set to use 4K blocks and not 512 byte sectors. I think so MBR could work drives upto 16TB.. The 4K sector drives dont cause problems for average users but when you use some older tools and such crashes.

Your problem might have to do with this 2TB boundry.. You might short stroke your drive and set it to use only less than 2TB for a while and see.. That way you can eleminate if it is a boundry problem or not. Not familiar with the asus H61, but did you check for newer bios versions? This 2TB issue has until recently been a major headache. And you do have to set the computer to performance mode so it dont turn off the cpu and hard drive. For testing you cant use power down modes.
 
The 4Tb HDD has been on for almost two days now and no freezes so far.

The continuous freezing I had two days ago was quite certainly related to Samsung Magician, that I didn't know could cause that. That was cured when I uninstalled it.

The power I had it in balanced, but set to "never" on sleep. Just in case I just changed it to high performance, where it's also always on.

I wonder if there's way to treat each HDD individually, as I think the problem might have been just that the SSD got into hibernation mode, causing the freeze.

Sorry if I don't know what UEFI means. The Asus laptop has a protected and hidden place, I don't know if in the HDD or the memory or I don't know where, where Windows 8 is and you can reinstall it. I did do that and it killed the infection (I think), even if not recovering the encrypted files.

But I will reinstall, as it has a mode, that takes several hours, where it deletes absolutely everything. So AFAIK that problem is solved.

There's an external WD Passport HDD I bought which was also connected to the laptop when it was infected, and the files also were encrypted. After the fresh install I downloaded copies of some of those encrypted files from e-mails I had sent. They were not encrypted, so I used those to work with them and do the job. No further files were encrypted, so I believe the infection was contained.

Just as a precaution, as I couldn't find out how the infection spreads, I never connected the Asus to the network when I assembled my new desktop, or the Passport. What I did was take some of the files I had created there, copied them to mem sticks and transferred them to the desktop. Now it's time to wipe the Passport and make a destructive W8 install on the laptop, using the protected files inside.

It's a pity I would need a NAS external system to work with external 3.5" HDDs, via network, on the laptop, and they are very expensive. Because the laptop is more powerful and faster than the desktop. It has less memory, 8Gb instead of 16Gb, but that should be enough for what I would do with it.

If I had had a NAS I wouldn't have bought Asus H61, and it's quite likely I would have a much better system.
 
BTW, I had a look at the Windows Events, and in the last 7 days, when the freezes happened there were just two that have higher numbers: WMI and Service Control Manager. There were 25 of them.

In the last 24 hours there was just one, called Volsnap, none of those above. On the previous 24 there was an Atapi (DVD drive) error, probably related to some reading error.

No NTFS errors.
 
OK, new freeze.

The only events registered show as sources WMI, Event log and Service Control Manager.

Does that help find where to look for the reason?
 
Today I had another freeze.

Now I'm beginning to think the problem might be elsewhere, not on the HDDs.

But I can't understand the Windows Events on what happened where.
 
Are you sure the computer actually froze and its not your keyboard/mouse that was put to sleep? I have had this happen many times where I had to replug it back into the USB port after something happened that made it stop. The computer wont respond since the driver seemes to have crashed or something. It happens when I move the mouse to change window positions or something similar. There is a blink on the screen and poof, I would reset the machine, then I changed the PS2/USB connector/adapter to a newier model and it dont do it any longer.. Sometimes changign ports would get it working but sometimes not. It would not cause this problem with USB3 ports only USB2 ports.
 
I'm still lurking around this thread but wanted to hear other people's opinion on how to help you carlmart...

Are there any bios updates for your board on the manufacturer's website?

Hm.... volsnap... a Volsnap (which is IIRC a Windows mechanism for backing-up data silently) combined with an ATAPI error would be a red flag to me.

There's lots of things I'd love to try on your PC but you said you don't want to destroy data so I'd rather not ask you to do it. BUT. If you have a backup:
- run a Linux Live CD and run the following commands:
----- fdisk -l (this would list your drives in the form of /dev/sda or /dev/sdb...)
----- write down the 'sdX' identifier of the drive you'd like to check
----- make double, triple, quadruple sure it's the right one
----- dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX (where sdX is the 'number' of your tested trive). - this would simply write zeroes to your drive and possibly freeze at the 'problem' point

Such a test would cut the problem in half - remove Windows from the equation.
But I realize it's difficult and dangerous :( sorry, out of ideas...
 
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