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HD "hang" intermitently

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papaschtroumpf

Senior member
I had 1 1TB drive in my machine and was experiencing "hangs" for a few seconds when I try to access the drive. for example windows explorer would freeze for several seconds, or the drive meter desktop gadget would stop updating, etc...

My drive was not in the greatest shape according to SMART to I changed it for a pair of WD20EARS set up for mirroring under Win7 Pro 32bit

Unfortunately it looks like the new drives experience the same symptoms
Copying to from old drive to new had an average transfer speed on only 14MB/s

* swapping cables, SATA ports didn't help. SMART info on the new drives doesn't show anything bad (in particular no CRC errors which would indicate bad SATA ports/cables)
* upgraded latest BIOS, chipset drivers (mobo is a GA-P35-D3SL), etc... but no difference
* this doesn't seem to be a "drive when to sleep and spun back up" issue, I copied large amounts of data to the drive with robocopy, which shows a % completion and I can see the % completion slow down a lot or get stuck
*turned off antivirus (Avira) but no difference.
* have Comodo firewall, I didn;t try to turn it off yet
* drive are WMA enabled. HDTune Pro reports UDMA Mode 7 is enabled but drive supports USM Mode 6, is that a problem? never heard of UDMA Mode 6

This is on Windows 7 Pro 32 bit by the way

I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this next.

Could it be some weird driver conflict? would trying it in safemode help?
 
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the WD20EARS are "green drives", they go into sleep mode after about ~10 seconds of inactivity, requiring about a second or two to wake up when you next attempt to access them.
It is possible to disable this using a specific tool I don't have a link for, if you do then they will only go to sleep when windows tells them to. By default windows tells the drive to go to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity on desktop, and 5 minutes on laptop IIRC. Disable that as well (it will be healthier for your drive... and waste about 1$ worth of electricity a year)

The slow transfer rate? were they both plugged in via SATA to the same mobo? otherwise such a slow rate is normal and expected. It is also possible that its due to whatever caused your old drive to fail SMART.
 
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taltamir said:
the WD20EARS are "green drives", they go into sleep mode after about ~10 seconds of inactivity, requiring about a second or two to wake up when you next attempt to access them.
Click to expand...
Yup (I think it's even 8 seconds ~), there's a FW update from WD that deactivates this "feature", although it's only for certain drives - no idea if EARS are supported..
 
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both drives a connected to the same SATA controller on the the mobo yes.

I'm not sure the "sleep after 8 seconds" issue is what I'm experiencing since I see the "hang" in the middle of a file transfer (copying a Ubuntu ISO for example, I see the progress slowdown and hang, then get back to fast again several times)

I may try and run WDIDLE3 (I think that's the utility you refer to) on the drives in a few days, but I might contact WD and see what they say first. As far as I can tell there is no FW update for this drive (mine is the latest 3 platter model of the WD20EARS by the way, I discovered there are 3 models with different firmware sold under that same part number)
 
papaschtroumpf said:
I'm not sure the "sleep after 8 seconds" issue is what I'm experiencing since I see the "hang" in the middle of a file transfer (copying a Ubuntu ISO for example, I see the progress slowdown and hang, then get back to fast again several times)
Click to expand...

that should never happen on any drive, even a green one. This means its definitely not the power savings that is causing it.

What OS are you using?
 
which shows a % completion and I can see the % completion slow down a lot or get stuck
Click to expand...
that might not necessarily mean that the drive is stalling, it could be a stutter in the progress report.
I am not familiar with robocopy, does robocopy update its progress bar by checking how many bits were transferred since the last second every second, or does it update it whenever a file finished copying? (maybe its just different sized files?)

have you tried installing the latest intel drivers for the SATA controller?
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19607&ProdId=2529&lang=eng

the _eng is english only 5MB, the _cd is all languages, 10MB. your choice.
 
The % is updated continuously, I tried copying a some of my ripped movies becuase they're all 700-800Mb and it's pretty obvious the speed varied widely.
you see the same behavior copying from windows explorer

I only updated the drivers from the gigabyte web site for my mobo GA-P35-D3SL, so I may look at the intel ones and see if they apply to my mobo. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
interesting, according to newegg and gigabyte itself http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2629#sp
your mobo uses ICH9. the basic model that does NOT have AHCI support. But I Thought you said you enabled AHCI...

maybe... gigabyte includes a seperate HDD controller, typically jmicron, that has 1 PATA and 2 SATA ports, and lets you do AHCI or even RAID on the SATA. Could this be where you got AHCI enabled? did you even plug in the new drive into that?

The drivers I linked do not support the ICH9 basic. They support ICH6R through current models, as long as they got some form of RAID or AHCI capability, but exclude the basic models which do not have any RAID or AHCI capability on the built in controller.

If you ARE using the jmicron controller... try using the built in intel ones instead. Intel controllers are a cut above their competitors... while jmicron are below.
 
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1 x IDE connector

intel's southbridge ICH9 does not have IDE support, this MUST come from an additional chip, those chips are typically 1 IDE + 2 SATA ports. And they have AHCI on the SATA ports.
 
good call, the manual shows JMicron 368 which is a single IDE controller chip, at first glance it doesn't seem to provide SATA though.

Fascinating, although probably not related to my original problem.

It looks like IHC9 does support AHCI but Intel originally didn't allow it?
I see some traffic on google about enabling it on XP through 3rd party drivers but I'm not clear whether Intel then officialy allowed it in Windows 7 (see http://tech.icrontic.com/news/intel-chipset-drivers-for-windows-7-have-arrived/ for example)

either way, I AHCI is enabled in the BIOS, so I would expect it is on (is there a way to tell?)
 
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