Interesting issue with drives having write errors - Computer Technical Help

MNOWAX · 06-20-2012, 01:30 AM

I am having issues with a Media Center PC I built. Originally I put a 550 Watt Chiefmax PSU in for a Single SATA HDD, a Sata DVD-RW, 3gb RAM, Athlon II X2 3.0 Ghz Processor and Windows XP. Every thing at the time was working fine.

Things have changed from the day I built it and added to the build is another IDE Drive and another SATA drive all now running at 5400RPM. Now when I access the other drives (other than the main OS drive) at the same time it will give write errors and go down. They will not be usable again until i reboot windows. I also am having issues with the DVD drive not spinning as fast as it once was and burning incredibly slow.

I have tested each hard drive separately, and in different PCs, they are all perfectly fine. I have also tested the PSU on its own, it seems to be giving the right kind of power to the drive connectors.

Is it what I think it is( power supply not giving enough power)? Do I need more power? If so, what should i be putting in here? If not, what do you all think is the issue?

I normally don't have issues with this kind of build but this one is just messing with my brain.

Freakin · 06-20-2012, 04:28 PM

Power should be more than sufficient for this setup. How old is the PSU? How many additional drives are you trying to power?
How did you "test each harddrive in a different PC"?
Are there any S.M.A.R.T. errors for the drives?
Are the write errors on the primary drive or the additional drives? How are they presented?
Have you run scandisk on the drives?

Are the sata ports all on the same controller? Who is the motherboard manufacturer?

Update the chipset drivers, and possibly the bios. Replace sata cables if you have any extras.

au4all · 06-20-2012, 04:41 PM

Beside those good questions above, what write errors are you seeing and where are you seeing it? Is there any information in the event log -- what exactly does it say?

What does it mean to say they are not useable until you reboot? They're not found in windows or explorer or something else?

How do you know that all the drives are being accessed at the same time -- accessed by what and doing what?

MNOWAX · 06-20-2012, 09:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Freakin

Power should be more than sufficient for this setup. How old is the PSU? How many additional drives are you trying to power? PSU is less than two years old. the total amount of drives being powered is 4, 2 SATA HDD, one IDE HDD and one Optical SATA drive.
How did you "test each harddrive in a different PC"? Pulled each hard drive, put in a different PC, then checked for SMART errors, did butterfly read and safe write tests on all of them
Are there any S.M.A.R.T. errors for the drives? no
Are the write errors on the primary drive or the additional drives? How are they presented? Only on the additional drives. they are presented as delayed write fails ( as if you had pulled a USB stick out of a slot when it was copying a file)
Have you run scandisk on the drives? Yes, no errors, and have tried this on both the native PC and a separate PC.

Are the sata ports all on the same controller? I have not checked this, but will tonight. this may be the problem, I didn't think of this. Who is the motherboard manufacturer? Update the chipset drivers, and possibly the bios. Replace sata cables if you have any extras. I redid the chipset drivers, but haven't done the BIOS yet. The motherboard is THIS

Quote:

Beside those good questions above, what write errors are you seeing and where are you seeing it? Is there any information in the event log -- what exactly does it say? "The Driver detected a controller error" nothing else. That may be my problem.

What does it mean to say they are not useable until you reboot? They're not found in windows or explorer or something else? What happens is that when the delayed write error comes up, if you try to access a file on the drive it will refuse to load anything. It will continue to "delay write fail" until you power off the PC.

How do you know that all the drives are being accessed at the same time -- accessed by what and doing what? Normally I can get this to do it every time by copying a file off of either the DVD drive directly onto my secondary (non-OS)drives, or copying a file from my OS drive to a non OS drive and using the third drive to listen to some music or watch a a video.

It looks like I will check the controllers tonight. That could definitely be the problem.

MNOWAX · 06-20-2012, 10:26 PM

the two SATA Hard drives show up on different channels of the same controller.

Looking around on Google as well, apparently this is a wider spread and more common problem than i thought.