SATA 3 Disks freeze, and go offline when being written too.

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Visolara

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Mar 18, 2013
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Some system specs;

Windows 7
Intel E8500 CPU
8 GB RAM
Mother Board; ASUS P5Q Deluxe LGA 775 Intel P45 (SATA 2)
New disk drives; TOSHIBA PH3200U-1I72 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache (SATA 3)

I grabbed 4 of these 2TB drives for data storage.

- I tested them with the Win7 testing tools under; Properties -> Tools -> Error Checking. I ran both tests.
- I ran SeaTools against them.
- I purchased HD Sentinal, ran the long check.

None of the above tools found anything wrong with the disks.

Here is my problem as best I can describe it; When I try and copy 50GB of pictures, videos, etc. from one of my older drives to the new one, it starts off just fine, runs for a bit (varies, sometimes it copies 2GB, other times 20GB), then I see it spike in disk usage in HD Sentinal, and writes drop to zero. It will sit here for what seems like some time out period then the drive just offlines itself. No error other then a popup telling me my destination drive does not exist.

Ive ran this against all 4 disks with the same results.

I am at a loss here with what could be wrong, searching the forum, googling, etc. hasn't really turned up anything.

I have read multiple posts about running SATA 3 disks on a SATA 2 HD and there should be no problem with that. Could I be hitting some other system miss configuration?

Any idea's?

Thank you!!
 
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Visolara

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Mar 18, 2013
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Hey, thanks for the quick response.

I will run some checks against the source tonight when I get home. Disk temps are all in the 25C range, that doesn't seem to hot at all.

No I/O errors, tho there is this message in HD Sentinal;

"Problems occurred between the communication of the disk and the host 304 times.

No actions needed."

Spoke to a friend at work, he had an idea it may be that these new drives I bought have the 4k bit block set, and my system may not be able to interpret it, so its potentially causing the failure?

I think I can put a jumper on the back of these drives and force them to SATA 2, but I need to research that a little more.

 
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Visolara

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Mar 18, 2013
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Ok, I think I figured out what is wrong.

The new disks have "Advanced Formatting", in other words, they have sector sizes of 4k;

Bytes Per Sector 4096 [Advanced Format]

My older drives, are the old standard 512k;

Bytes Per Sector 512

I believe this is what is causing my problem.

Now onto the solution, any idea's short of buying a new boot disk that has advanced formatting on it?

How about playing with the jumpers on the new drives? Can't I manually make them 512k or something with a jumper? This is an area I am very unfamiliar with.

Thanks all !

 
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noidea_77

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I don't think the format is the problem. If the driver or controller is not "4k-capable" it shouldn't recognize the disk/partition at all. The error message about communication problems between the disks and the host worries me more. Do you have a chance to change the sata cables?
 
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AutomaticCoding

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Posting simply so that tomshardware emails me upon replies, I have the same issue with two of my drives, I'm going to RMA them the second I get into a state where I have enough time to, but, I'd like to follow this to see if you work out a temporary/perm fix.
 
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