Blog » HDD problems with P8Z68-Pro and Marvell controller

Posted by Roguey on Thursday 9th June, 2011   ·   0 comments

Yesterday I was having a few problems with Windows - every so often it would freeze for like 30 seconds, after-which everything would come back and resume. It seem to get worse the more data I transfer on my main HDD (the WD black drive). It looked like there could be a problem with either the HDD, power settings or a DVD-Rom drive (I started noticing ATAPI errors in my system log).

Things got pretty bad at one stage - Windows freezing quite often. The best way to describle it is by showing you the result from HD Tach (a HDD benchmarking tool):



Normally the chart should start high, and taper off by curving. However to see this graph going all over the place wasnt right! It looked like the HDD was messing around - my other drive was behaving fine - like it should.

So I first started to unplugged the DVD drive (encase there was some weird error between it and the HDD - there was ATAPI errors in the windows logs)... still the same! So I thought what about using a different HDD controller on the motherboard (ie. the Intel ones and not the Marvell one). Amazing, everything changed - the system was faster, more responsive and best of all... wasnt freezing. YAY! Now HD Tach looks like this:



Much better eh! I dont know if its something to do with my WD black drive being 6Gbps or not - as my green drive has no problems with the Marvell controller. I am glad the drive was okay.. phew!

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