Diagnosing I/O failure (failing SATA controller)?

[Rhaegarx]

I've been having serious instability issues with my PC for a couple of months now. It began when I started getting random system hangs and reboots on Windows 7 installed on my Crucial M4 SSD. Occasionally my games drive would also "disappear" from Windows which typically would be resolved by a reboot. Thinking that I was experiencing one or more drive failures or having gone 3 years without doing a fresh Windows install I decided to switch to Windows 10 on a brand new Samsung 840 evo. The rest of my PC remained the same.

Almost immediately I started running into issues. At this time I should probably go over my complete specs:

Asus P8P67 Pro Rev 3.1 (The rev 3.1 here means I'm running Bios 3602 - the latest that I'm aware of)
i5 2500k (not overclocked at this time) w/ coolermaster hyper 212 heatsink
MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G (latest drivers)

The first thing I did was to update everything. Got the latest bios as I mentioned above and the latest intel AHCI/RAID drivers from the asus website (64bit Windows 8.1 though). Also the latest drivers I could find for the Marvell SATA controller on the Asus board.

Despite updating everything I could think of I'm experiencing a great deal of instability that materializes in various ways:

1. While downloading large files (i.e. torrents) to my storage drive (separate to both my primary SSD and my games drive) uTorrent would suddenly report an I/O error, the drive would disappear from Windows and I'd have to reboot which would solve the problem.

Windows Event Viewer:
~10 "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued" errors (event 29 storahci), follow by several "The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeId: J:, DeviceName: \Device\HarddiskVolume3. (A device which does not exist was specified.)" (event 140 Ntfs) which makes sense, and "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a paging operation" (event 51 disk).

2. While playing a game (again games are on a separate drive) or just after shutting down a game (steam) it'll crash to a black screen with disk read error occurred message.

Trying to reboot after this error occurs usually results in a "Windows failed to start" error. The Windows Boot Configuration File does not contain a valid OS. Waiting 10-15 minutes and then trying to boot usually works and I'm able to get into windows. The frustrating thing about this error is that there's usually no errors in Windows Event Viewer.

3. Windows Event Viewer errors with no noticeable symptoms such as:
"The IO operation at logical block address 0x2b5a02 for Disk 0 (PDO name: \Device\00000030) was retried". This errors seem to occur in blocks and then go away.

And, "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort1, was issued" happens often.

So that's about it. Obviously I'm thinking hardware, possibly my SATA controllers although it appears to be spread across drives that use both the intel and Marvell SATA controllers.

If it's my mobo, fair enough, but I'd really like to be sure it's the mobo before replacing it. Is there anything I could do to really narrow down the issue and be sure it's something specific?

Appreciate all the help.

 

[LTC8K6]

Bad SATA cable?

I just discovered that a SATA cable had come a little loose, just enough to cause trouble, but not enough to be easily visible.

I don't know if one bad cable could affect other ports?

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is kind of a guess, but if the problem is happening with multiple drives, across two different controllers, then the problem could be a flaky PSU. If the +5V or +3.3V line is flaking out, you might get SATA controller failures. I had a similar issue recently, with a PSU that came with a case, and suddenly, my USB RF keyboard / mouse dongle wasn't being detected at boot. I think that there were some disk issues too, like I thought the drive was failing. After trying all of the USB ports (Front, Back, etc.), and still not being detected, I swapped in a good PSU, and all was good again.

Something to try, I guess.

 

[Rhaegarx]

It's not the SATA cables. I've been moving them around and changing them out without an improvement.

This power supply suggestion is interesting though. In additional to the I/O issues I've also been experiencing random loss of functionality to my usb ports (the ones directly off the mobo) which cause the mouse or keyboard or both to stop functioning. A reboot has always fixed this issue.

Hmmm...

 

[sm625]

You could try a card like this:

http://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-15-124-020

Put your storage and games drives on that controller, and leave your OS where it is. See which ones fail.

 

[SERT Data Recov]

1st off make sure you backup all your data to a reliable external device.

Then try to see if there is a firmware update for your SSD. Check your RAM. Turn off the machine, pop it out and re-seat it.

2ndly your computer is giving you many clues as to what is going on here.

"The IO operation at logical block address 0x2b5a02 for Disk 0 (PDO name: \Device\00000030) was retried"

is telling you there are bad blocks (sectors) on that drive.

• "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a paging operation" (event 51 disk)
• While downloading large files (i.e. torrents) to my storage drive (separate to both my primary SSD and my games drive) uTorrent would suddenly report an I/O error, the drive would disappear from Windows
• it'll crash to a black screen with disk read error occurred message
• "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort1, was issued"
• random system hangs and reboots on Windows 7

These are all common symptoms of a failing hard drive. Also NEVER think because a drive is NEW that it can't fail or have problems right out of the box.