Weird problem - new sata 2 drive

[Yeke]

Ok have tried technical support from maxtor twice and they havn't bothered to even mail me in 1 month, tried on overclockers forum and got bizzare replies with no relevance to my problem :<

I recently bought a 250gb sata 2 diamondmax 10 NCQ - 6v250f0 install went smooth and all benchmark tests report expected results however I keep getting blue screen errors which after sending the windows error report gives a vauge error saying that windows was tempararly unable to read the drive.

The weird part of this is about 90% of the time this happens is when I stand up and walk away from my pc.

Have tried different power cables/sata connectors same result have noticed on occasion I get a period of stutter in games lasting maybe a minute but this is fairly rare and I'm not sure if this is related.

spec :
3200xp 64 2ghz
1 gb ram
asrock duel sata 2 : bios is up to date and all drivers
9700 pro agp

any ideas?

 

[Naffets]

is the drive running at SATAII? I read in the newest custompc they had issues getting an asrock board to use sataII, they had to force it onto SATAI

 

[confused]

First guess would be PSU, what wattage is it and you might want to try running speedfan on voltages/ampage on the 12v rails

 

[Yeke]

Cheers for replies Ill try forcing it to sata1 iirc thats just a case of changing the jumper on the back of the hard drive?

PSU while not a quality brand the rails are stable and reading around what they should except that the -12 and -5 lines report wrongly think thats a board fault tho :< 1.87 and 2.54 respectivly

 

[Naffets]

np Yeke, glad i was helpful

 

[Yeke]

Amusing thing is I've just recieved mail from maxtor advising to do the same thing :O better extremly late than never I guess

They also ask me to use their diagnostic tool powermax which incedently dosn't detect sata drives 0o really starting to regret buying maxtor tbh hope the product itself proves more reliable than there tech support.

 

[Aran Thule]

couple of things, we had a problem with the new sata drives, some of them would intimitantly not be detected during bootup.
we had to update the firmware on it.
another issue was that it didnt seem to like via chipset motherboards, had to change the jumper on drive for that.

Hope you get it working.

 

[Gahn]

U also may want to check if your MB got a bios upgrade to deal with SataII drives, since u bought it u might as well make it work .

 

[Naffets]

Maxtors sata drives are fucking awful, switched to WD and ill never look back, i've had 2 300gb diamondmax + 10's fail in the space of about 14 months. One of them was shipped to me WITH a fault, required a flash as noted by someone else.

So stay away from maxtor imo.

 

[Dracus]

Maxtors sata drives are fucking awful, switched to WD and ill never look back, i've had 2 300gb diamondmax + 10's fail in the space of about 14 months. One of them was shipped to me WITH a fault, required a flash as noted by someone else.

So stay away from maxtor imo.

Agreed Imo...bought a sata2 maxtor 250gb, first one I got had an error after only 3 weeks use..on 2nd one atm <crosses fingers>

Any experience with Seagate Naff? not really fond of WD..altho its a while ago I used em more frequently.

/Dracus

 

[Naffets]

Had a few Seagate drives a long while since, that old they were PATA IDE100. So no experience with their drives, Samsung Spinpoint drives appear to be the way to go as they are really high performance.

The way i see it, if WD can produce the fastest production hard drive then surely they can't be too bad

You can get a 400GB WD SATAII drive for about £140 now

 

[UndyingAngel]

on a note with this have always used Maxtor drives and never had a problem, but have had anumber of probelms with WD and seagate.

The place where I work used Seagate, the amount of returns we got for faulty HDD in this day and age is stupid, as one would say they dont build em like they used to.


Then again its not as bad as power supply returns,

 

[Naffets]

two maxtor pata drives i have still both work

the two sata ones i have are both fucked.

 

[Soulslayer]

WD sata drives with the secureconnect cable
never looked back (i hate normal sata cables, so damn flimsy)

 

[Yeke]

:/ thought I had solved this problem by setting it to sata 1 however its still happening just to a lesser degree had uptimes of 2 days+ since changing it but I'm still getting the error

Also another problem related to DAoC I can play for hours on end duel logged in pve with little lag and no problems however when in RvR and a few enemies are in the area I get a VPU recovery, blank screen then desktop and daoc windows but black and sound :<

This happens in all clients tried loads of different drivers different agp drivers (asrock one and uli one) any suggestions?

 

[UndyingAngel]

:/ thought I had solved this problem by setting it to sata 1 however its still happening just to a lesser degree had uptimes of 2 days+ since changing it but I'm still getting the error

Also another problem related to DAoC I can play for hours on end duel logged in pve with little lag and no problems however when in RvR and a few enemies are in the area I get a VPU recovery, blank screen then desktop and daoc windows but black and sound :<

This happens in all clients tried loads of different drivers different agp drivers (asrock one and uli one) any suggestions?

Sounds to be like a PSU issue when the system is under pressure, the PSU cannot handel the load typical with cheap PSU's when running High END GPU's and / or Using lots of system resources at once,

 

[UndyingAngel]

on another note i didnt know there was a AGP mobo that suported SATA2. not that I have looked anyway. im gonna look for the SMART(Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) tool for you to download and post the report for me so we can see if its a drive problme or another issue

 

[UndyingAngel]

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/docs/html/smart%20raw%20view.htm

 

[Yeke]

thanks for the reply.

had already checked the S.M.A.R.T using speed fan but downloaded that tool and checked just to make sure and everything came back ok.

It could be a PSU problem its 550w rated but isn't a quality brand however the lines do report as stable and close to what they should be, also I'm not running many power intensive parts 1 hd 1 optical drive 9700 pro and a few fans,also it seems to run oblivion perfectly and thats just a little more intensive that toa client, I am planning when money allows to replace it with a better one but was desperate for one when my old one died.

I've got a 9600 card I could try which shouldnt draw nearly as much power might give it a try later.

 

[Naffets]

550w non branded should be fine unless its faulty.

in my old pc i had:

550w
1tb off hdd space (3 hdds)
9800 pro
1 dvdrw

and that was stable as anything.