The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Yes. It has to be the sata 3.0 ports. One of my FALS drives is connected as well, and is exhibiting the same exact issues. I'm gonna run my OS drive to the 2.0 port for sure now. This really should have occurred to me sooner LOL!

 

Curious, I will have to try my S-ATA3 ports. I see no reason to use them yet, as I need to make sure they operate in low-speed mode in order to keep 8x/8x on the graphics, and that sort of defeats the point of them.

 

Well, problem solved LOL! Good thing I marked the sata cables with a #6 for using the Sata 3.0 ports. Made the switcharoo MUCH quicker. In fact I had it switched and running in 3 minutes. Had to change the boot priority though. Apparently the bios remembers the Address or channel, and not the Hard drives name. All seems to be well for the time being. *Knocking on wood* LOL!

 

That looks much better! This shows there are no errors with the drive, it has only been powered on/off 58 times, and has been running for 702 hours. Spinup time is also typically excellent like all 10k drives, at just 3.066 seconds. (A standard 7200rpm drive takes between 6 and 10 seconds to spin up).

 

LOL! Thanks for the reassurance. Much appreciated. Helps me sleep at night

 

Sam,
Thanks! I'll pass that along.

Russ

 

Hmm Sam maybe you can be of some help here. Just got a 500GB Seagate 7200.10 in an external enclosure(free). Plug it in through SATA and I get this:



What can you tell me about this? The read and seek errors are especially alarming.

Power on hours is the amount of time the drive has spent on correct? All of my drives have a stupidly high value for this. One older one in particular(250GB Seagate) over 10,000.

The drive is a bit noisy yes but it seems to be working fine. Is a kind of old though so eh...

 

Wow. Zero seconds to spin up Looks fairly healthy for hours running. But I don't know much about interpreting S.M.A.R.T.

Oh, its 9.3 seconds. My bad LOL!

 

Just for the record almost every single drive I own scores like 97-99 for fitness and performance. Maybe this one is showing bad values because its in an enclosure? I know the 7200.10 isn't the most reputable model but this one at least works...

 

LOL. My veloci was reporting 100% on both marks, while connected to the Sata 3.0 port. Obviously that's false I realize now
While on the 3.0 port, it was very erratic. Its a wonder the OS operated as well as it did. It seems to be much snappier now. Obviously NEC/Gigabyte need to work on drivers for these badboys LOL!

 

7200.10 drives do that in Speedfan, mine looks exactly the same. I wouldn't worry about it, the error rates don't seem to be read properly by SpeedFan. Power on hours is easily possible, the drive only need be powered on 12 hours a day for 2 and a bit years to achieve 9700 hours. Some of my drives have ratings that high, if not higher.

 

Well, I've found my mystery re-boot problem. The Sata cable to the AD-7220s. I've been trying to isolate the problem, for a while now. Turns out that the Sata cable is defective. There's plastic flashing inside the female "L" of the end that goes into the drive. The plug won't quite go in all the way, so the lock doesn't catch. I installed a new Sata Data cable for the AD-7220s, and everything works fine again. It will do multiple burns again. I'm all for a return to the IDE interface! I've replaced more Sata cables in the last few years, than I've replaced IDE cables in over 20 years of repairing computers. Unlike Sata, I've never had a disk partition on another drive format with IDE when installing Windows, like I've had a couple of times with Sata. I never once had to remove any drives to install a new OS. Lets face it, the Sata connections are Piss Poor, and work half-assed! Why can't they design a Sata plug that isn't so damn fragile!

Here's a little helpful hint. When replacing a Sata Data cable, use some spray contact cleaner and put the plug in and out a couple of times. I'm seeing carbon traces on the connections on the drive, caused by a high resistance connection. The carbon traces are caused by arcing at the connection. This is what causes drives to disappear and re-appear from time to time in Windows.

S-ATA Sucks,
Russ

 

I like everything about S-ATA except the cable connector design, it surely wouldn't be hard to keep the same cable size with a connector that works!

 

Correction, Sata 3.0 Sucks LOL! At least at present I'm afraid as a whole, I haven't had many troubles with Sata. Hopefully I never do. I think I understand where you're coming from though russ

 

Definitely pleased how my secondary is running now. Its noticeably cooler in my room, and its hotter outside now as well. Now I know it was worth it

 

Sam,
The cables are a given, considering the flimsy connections. My biggest issue with them is having to disconnect all other Sata HDDs, so you don't accidentally format a partition on another drive at the same time. I've actually done that twice! both times it cost me about 2/3 of what was on the partition. I lost over $5000 worth of work the last time! Can you blame me for being Pissed? BTW, it only happens when formatting the Boot drive, something I do whenever I install a new OS! The whole point of my rant is that these problems have existed since the inception of Sata. Doesn't anyone besides me feel that it's damn well time that they either make the interface work properly or scrap the whole damn thing! The real question is, is the problem the cables, or is it the drives themselves. Also, has anyone else noticed that 99% of the time, cable problems occur with ODDs, not HDDs! Usually if it's an HDD, it just doesn't work or show in Windows, without all this hit or miss crap we get with ODDs! They need to do something to make the connection stronger. With all the complaints about Sata problems and bad data cables, you would think they would do something about it. It seems the best way is like most of the pre-builts do it. One Sata HDD and 1 IDE ODD! They never seem to have any problems doing it that way!

Russ

 

That issue has nothing to do with S-ATA, as the drive names coming up wrong in the windows formatter happens with IDE as well. I rarely have cable issues with ODDs, probably because I rarely use ODDs. It's almost always HDDs for me!

 

i normally have 3 partions on my OS drive and i have formatted the OS partition maybe 10-20 times over the last 4-5 years with no problem, i like to reinstall my OS's every few months.

 

Shaff,
It doesn't format any other partition on the same hard drive when you format the boot partition. With mine, it would format the second partition on my second physical hard drive, as well as the Boot partition. The loss of data comes from the different size partitions. If you have an 80GB partition for the boot drive, it will try to format a 250GB as an 80GB partition. That's why you lose so much data! When chkdsk tries to recover it, it only about 30-35% successful! Me? I disconnect every physical Hsrd Drive, and then install the OS. Once that's finished and the drivers installed, I hook up my other physical HDDs. In reality, you shouldn't ever have to remove a drive, just to install an OS on another drive! I'm far from alone in having it happen to me. There are pages about the problem on the internet!

Russ