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Overclocking and SATA HDD data corruption

W

wgoldfarb

Senior member
After lots of reading on this forum I understand that if I overclock my system (and therefore my system bus) I need to lock the PCI clock to prevent possible data corruption problems with IDE hard drives. But what happens if I have a SATA hard drive? Will locking the PCI bus to 33.3 also take care of the SATA drive, or is there a separate clock that I need to worry about? As far as I can tell my BIOS (Asus P5B Deluxe) only allows me to lock the PCI clock and the PCIe frequency. Is there some other frequency/clock setting elsewhere that I need to worry about to prevent data corruption on the SATA hard drive resulting from overclocking the system bus?

In case it makes any difference, I have my SATA controller configured as AHCI.
 
I have never heard of such a thing. I simply set my PCI-E frequency to 105Mhz and away I went. No problems with data corruption on either my IDE or SATA drives yet.
 
I could be wrong and expect to get flamed if I am, PCI-E refers to your expansion cards video /audio/TV/ etc, and this would include a sata/IDE raid card IF you are using one. my PCI-E is set to 33.3 and 120, I use onboard sata and IDE as there are plenty for my needs. My Asus P5LD2-VM board is set the same way and I will lose onboard sata occasionally if I clock high enough as I can not increase the south-bridge voltage to that chip. My sig system does, "SB Vcore" I'm not sure if your P5B has this setting but this is what controls the sata, not the pcie unless you use an "add in card"
 
Originally posted by: WoodButcher
I could be wrong and expect to get flamed if I am, PCI-E refers to your expansion cards video /audio/TV/ etc, and this would include a sata/IDE raid card IF you are using one. my PCI-E is set to 33.3 and 120, I use onboard sata and IDE as there are plenty for my needs. My Asus P5LD2-VM board is set the same way and I will lose onboard sata occasionally if I clock high enough as I can not increase the south-bridge voltage to that chip. My sig system does, "SB Vcore" I'm not sure if your P5B has this setting but this is what controls the sata, not the pcie unless you use an "add in card"
Click to expand...

While that may be the case on your particular motherboard, it is not true for all boards. A common configuration on boards with lots of SATA ports is to have some number (usually 4) embedded in the southbridge, and then another 2 or 4 on another chip on the PCIe bus, or even the PCI bus (although this is much less common now). And depending on the internal design of the southbridge, even the ones 'inside' it may also be effectively on the PCIe bus.

Locking both the PCI and PCIe frequencies should prevent you from getting data corruption from data being corrupted on the bus itself. You can still get data corruption from things like an unstable CPU/memory overclock (due to data being corrupted in memory and then being written to the disk, or a miscalculation in where the data should be written on disk, etc.)
 
Thank you Matthias! I stand corrected.


wgoldfarb- when I did lose the HD's it was no biggie, restart , clock down and there they were. Go for it, You have a good setup, see where it takes you.
 
Thanks to everyone for the great replies. One less thing to worry about, which as a first time overclocker is a very good thing to have! 😉
 
Originally posted by: Rubycon
Woah PCI-E is 100 MHz. 120MHz is definitely asking for trouble.
Click to expand...

Yea, I lock my pci to 33, and my pcie to 100. I thought about raising them for a performance gain, but the risk to my data just isn't worth it.
 
Originally posted by: Rubycon
Woah PCI-E is 100 MHz. 120MHz is definitely asking for trouble.
Click to expand...

The P5LD2-VM wouldn't clock without it. I don't recall where I found it, but 120 is the max.

lxskllr- what, no backup?
 
Originally posted by: WoodButcher
Originally posted by: Rubycon
Woah PCI-E is 100 MHz. 120MHz is definitely asking for trouble.
Click to expand...

The P5LD2-VM wouldn't clock without it. I don't recall where I found it, but 120 is the max.

lxskllr- what, no backup?
Click to expand...

Well I do infrequent backups, but with data corruption from the south bridge there's really no way to keep ahead of it. I guess you could do daily backups, but then you couldn't even really trust them without checking checksums on everything. That's just too much hassle for a (from what I hear) modest performance gain. Even the hardcore, exotic cooling crowd tends to stay away from overclocking the pci busses
 
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