Problem with drive performance

SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
edited October 2007 in Hardware
I just rebuilt my system (if you haven't seen my threads elsewhere, a Q6600 on a GA-P35-DS4), and kept all my HDDs from the last install, where I didn't see this problem. I've got two Raptors in RAID 0 with Vista installed, and 4 other SATA HDDs for media, files, etc. On the Vista install, it didn't ask for my RAID drivers, it just recognized the drive off the bat. These hard drives are exactly the same as on my previous Vista install, too, and I never noticed this issue (X2 6000+ and an Asus Crosshair).

The issue is that every once in a while, I hear what sounds like a drive slowly spinning up, and the computer becomes unresponsive until it finishes spinning up (or at least until that sound finishes, if it's not that). It's happened on boot before, where the BIOS identifies all the drives connected; it normally takes 5ish seconds and if this spin-up happens while it's going on, it takes 25-30 seconds.

I haven't been able to discern which drive it is. Three of the drives are very new, three are a couple years old. I'm wondering if it could be that the drives aren't getting enough power, or maybe it's a heat issue, or maybe one is just flat-out failing. Does anybody have any idea what I'm talking about, experienced this issue before? Are there any HDD-monitoring or health programs (besides S.M.A.R.T., which every time I reboot I forget to enable to check) that I can use? Could not having F6'd the Windows installer to install the given drivers caused this, even though the drive showed up correctly without them? Do you guys need more information?

Thanks for any advice, you guys haven't let me down yet.

Comments

  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited October 2007
    Power could definatly be a problem and for some reason the problem gets to be a ton worse when you have to use several power extenders/adapters or spliters.

    Try and balance the load on differant PSU leads if possible also.

    Tex
  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    edited October 2007
    Well, I thought I had isolated which drive it was, but I unplugged it and a different one started doing it, so I dunno. I verified my power situation (each modular cable has 3 SATA power connectors to it, and that's an even one per drive, no extenders or anything) and cleared up my wiring, made sure my fans were working well. Either I got the wrong drive or it's a system-wide thing, which means I'll be checking my BIOS settings as well, and see what's going on there. The worst part is it's intermittent and seemingly random, so I dunno. I'm gonna screw with the BIOS and see what happens, and if that doesn't fix anything, I guess I'm going to just drop everything down to my OS RAID drives, see if it's fine with that, and then start adding drives back one at a time.

    Anybody else with other ideas for me to try? SATA drives don't even have jumper settings, right?
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited October 2007
    Hey, I think I know something about the problem. The first SATA slot will be recognized as the boot device position, regardless if the drive connected to that slot is in RAID or not. The BIOS looks to the individual drive as the boot device. You have to build your RAID on other SATA slots. Sorry, I didn't explain it too well. I believe there's a thread going on now about this over at Abit Forums.

    Also, have you tried setting the BIOS to allow a delay for the drives to spin up? I forgot what the setting is called.
  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    edited October 2007
    Well, I don't know if that really makes sense. The system boots fine, these spinups seem to happen while I'm in Vista already. I'm down to thinking it's a software problem somewhere, so I'm hunting around. I noticed that while the spins happened sometimes when I wasn't running F@H, nothing froze in that case, so these spins take CPU power, it seems. I dunno, I'm still hunting around.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited October 2007
    spinups seem to happen while I'm in Vista already
    LOL Yes, you're right. My comment didn't make much sense. Sorry, I've had a lot of late nights this week. No, it's not my age...
  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    edited October 2007
    Haha, not a problem. I appreciate the help.
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