Question Dying SATA Ports? X58 rig

Nov 26, 2005
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Within the past 6 months I had to swap out my Asrock X58 motherboard because I thought the SATA ports were dying. I have a HDD/SDD Power strip that turns off all my storage drives while not in use. 6 out of the 8 ports on the EVGA X58 board are populated with the other two being run off a SATA RAID expansion card. 2 are SSD drives the other 6 are HDD Drives. The SSD drives are constantly active.

Last night I did a backup run and things went fine. A few hours later while Firefox tried updating the entire system came to a halt. SSD usage hit 100% for about 15-20 min. Checked Resource manager and the processes that were using the most on the SSD (main boot drive) were Microsoft processes. Some other funky stuff happened like Windows was asking me how to setup Security settings and some other weird stuff that normally wouldn't appear, all the while being very unresponsive. Had to hard reboot the system, that next boot took super long, and for about 15-20 min again SSD use was 100% with MS processes. 2 reboots and the same behavior. Still the same behavior on fresh boots and now I'm noticing odd behavior like minor SSD usage but things are HDD like responsive that shouldn't be e.g. doing a Sensor run with HWinfo64 stalled out for about 30 seconds. Installed Samsung Magician and no foul reports, 'Good Health'. I've run DISM, sfc /scannow, disk cleanup, Trim, MS Security essentials full scan, and nothing seems to be indicating an issue. Could these ports on the EVGA be going? I do have one last X58 board to test before I'd have to update an entire platform (MB, RAM, CPU)
 

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
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Ya, I wouldn't trust the built in RAID mode on X58 boards too much. These boards are already pretty old, and I would just use software RAID if need be. Just keep controller in AHCI mode is what I would do. Less headache.
 
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Nov 26, 2005
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I've never used hardware raid. I've always used the onboard SATA ports in AHCI mode with the software Mirror Folder. I'm done with Mirror Folder and will be using SyncToy from Microsoft, and I'll no longer use the SATA ports on a motherboard for the HDD backups. I've had a 4 port SATA card that I used for 2 of the drives that's actually never died or failed. It uses a Sil3114 controller chipset but it's a PCI card. I'm fortunate to still be able to run 1 SSD off the main SATA chipset, with the other SSD on the RAID chipset. I just need to find a new SATA adapter card that's PCIe with a good controller chipset. The PCI card I'm using is an old Rosewill 4 port, I'd need 4 or more ports, all internal.

How's this one?


Or this?


This one uses a Marvell 88SE9215 + JMicron JMB5xx chip
 
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