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Help... SATA Hard Drive and NForce4

V

vikingblade

Senior member
I have an EPOX Ultra NForce4 Motherboard and a SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 Hard drive. I have had frequent WinXP Boot/loading problems. My tech thinks its a bad drive....Im not sure. Sometimes windows loads fine, other days it takes several attempts...restarts to load, often even more.

Anyways, Im tired of trouble shooting this and ive decided to simply buy a new hard drive and start fresh. The thing is.. in my research to fix this, ive read many reports of seagate and maxtor sata drives having trouble with nforce 4 motherboards. im trying to eliminate potential difficulties.

is it the sata drives that are giving problems with the nforce4. would a standard ide drive eliminate this... OR... would a different sata drive like...Western Digital be better than a maxtor, seagate with my motherboard.

Which/What HD is my best bet for compatibility with my NForce4 Motherboard.

Anyone with experience or knowledge in this area... help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
 
Standard ide should let you skip installing the nvidia SATA drivers, one less thing to go wrong.

You don't give up any noticeable performance dropping down from 150 to ATA-100 for drives from the same family.

If you feel like changing brands, the Samsung Spinpoint drives are cheap, cool, and quiet.
 
I have WD, Maxtor, and Seagate. They all seem to work fine with my nforce 4 board (Rev 1 of the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe). I didn't even need to load any SATA drivers during the XP install. Personally though, I'd prefer Seagate or WD over Maxtor though.
 
thnx. dunno if i should go with the sata2 drive or ide. wish i knew what hard drive would be least likely to give me problems. ive heard about maxtor and seagate sata but nothing about western digital having trouble with nforce 4. anyone??

if going ide eliminates the problem, how much performance would i lose in gaming. it kinda sucks that the newest drive technology has problems with the most popular motherboard chipset.

anyone out here running an amd nforce4 motherboard with a sata 2 western digital caviar drive, winxp home and an ati x1800 video card?

ORION...I got the same things going on. really pissing me off.
 
i've had the same problem with my asus sli-deluxe and hitachi 160 sata drive. it could go months without a problem and then twice in 3 days where it just wouldn't load and restart while attempts to load. I usually go into safemode with networking and then restart and it goes through fine. This happens wheter i have my maxtor ide backup drive connected or not. A couple of times the boot order got screwed up so i got a sata adapter for it and its sitting in S2 so the boot order doesn't get messed up. This still happens every once in a while. I was considering getting another sata drive but i guess it wouldn't really make a difference.
 
I had huge problems with my 2 Seagate 80GB SATA 150 drives in RAID 0 on a DFI board with a NF4 Ultra chipset. They just didn't work together very well. Sometimes I'd have to run chkdsk /r at bootup via the recovery console just to get to Windows.

Now I have a Abit AT8 with the same drives and no problems related to the HDDs that I know of. Hope that helps.
 
My understanding was this was more of a Maxtor issue with a certain brand of their DiamondMax drives and NF4 boards, but some of you guys are seeing otherwise ... I just ordered a WD 250 SATA2 to go with my NF4 board so I should be OK, but it does make you stress out over the initial setup and burn-in. The Maxtor issue was to be addressed by a firmware update I had thought.
 
there are thousands of links on the web about SATA i SATA II probs
they basically cause two anomolies......
Win XP wont recognize or install wont go
After install, detection is iffy - good sometimes, bad another.(flakey cables dont help - I have been tempted to directly solder cable wires to connector pins on both ends, but that would ruin mobo and hdd)
while it appears most often with Maxtor and NF4 - it also happens with NF3 and even NF2 and Seagate and WD and Hitatchi and VIA chipsets also.
SATA II is simply not ready for primetime - the chipset/HDD controller/HDD firmware/NV drivers/XP O/S/SATA Protocol at present simply do not work together well

There are 5 or 6 things to do that help your chances for success, and I have noted them at leat a dozen times, so I wont repeat them here

There are also new nforce driver set out today (including SATA and SATA RAID) vers. 9.16 WHQL. Whether these help - cant say yet.
http://www.station-drivers.com/page/nvidia%20nforce.htm (both 32 and 64 bit)
 
well...i ordered a western digital caviar sata II, 320 gig drive from the egg. I really, really hope this drive doesnt give me the same trouble. Im now thinking i shudda went with an ide drive to completely avoid this whole mess. its pretty unacceptable that the latest sata II drives are iffy with a new motherboard.

im afraid to shut down my pc. just decided to leave it on 24/7. it really sucks that a newly made, well researched pc build has such an issue. i mean what are the options here... risk this happening or going with a hard drive technology from years past.
 
I tried SATA on one of my recent builds, it was a WD 80GB from newegg, at the same time I also ordered the IDE version....built 2 identical systems, with exception of the hard drives of course, same MB, ram, video, sound, cpu, etc... noticed NO difference in my games at all, MS combat flight sim, and pacific fighters....the times for loading pages and loading the games were the same and the FPS were the same....I am not convinced that SATA is ready yet, there are limitations still at the bus level that simply dont allow it to function at its best....maybe SATA 2 or higher will remedy this, I dont know. All I know is I wont be using SATA for anymore builds due to the fact it doesnt seem to make a bit of difference in my real world builds...period. Synthetic Benchmarks dont always mirror real world performance. So in a nutshell, I would have went with the IDE version and been done, you wont see any difference.
 
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