Data corruption with SATA drives on an NF7-S?

Abit User · Oct 3, 2003

Hello folks. I built a new system with an NF7-S motherboard a few days ago, and have two drives in it...a Western Digital SATA drive on the first channel (which is my boot drive) powered by a legacy power connector, and a Maxtor ATA-133 drive on the second channel, using a Serilill adapter. I'm running a clean install of XP sp1 with all latest drivers, including the newest driver for the SATA controller.

I'm fairly new to SATA technology, so bear with me if I'm missing some obvious things. I'm noticing that when I try to do two data transfer operations between them at once (in my case, copying documents between two directories while transferring some pictures from some others), the operation crashes and corrupts a lot of the data. It's fine as long as I only do one thing at a time, but it's data corruption and a lengthy session of Chkdsk if I try to do two. In games, I'm seeing a 'stutter' that could be attributed to drive access issues as well.

I notice that XP detects the drives as SCSI drives, when they're really not. One option that comes to mind is on the 'SCSI Properties' sheet in device manager for the drives, there are checkboxes for 'disable tagged queuing' and 'disable synchronous transfers'. Would checking these off be advisable? Is this something that can be caused by using the standard power connector on the drive instead of the SATA power connector? Or is it perhaps just a bad drive (or bad controller on the motherboard)? The older Maxtor drive with the adapter seems to be a lot more stable than the new WD drive, but then again all the transfers have tended to be Maxtor --> WD, so the WD drive is being stressed more.

As a side note, the 'stutter' problem in games is almost completely alleviated by removing my new FX 5600 video card and putting in my older Ti-4200 card. I don't know if this is due to less demand on the system or what, but thought I'd include this information as possibly relevent.

Thanks for any assistance or advice!

Lloyd

Full system details:

Athlon 2800+
Abit NF7-S
Antec True-430W Power supply
2x 512MB Crucial DDR 3200 RAM
MSI GeForce FX 5200-128VTDR (using an Abit Ti-4200 atm) <AGP slot> SB Audigy 2 Platinum <PCI 2> WD 120GB SATA <SATA port 1, boot drive> Maxtor 200GB ATA-133 (SATA 2 port with adapter) Plextor PX-708A DVD R/RW Lite-On DVD drive (generic) Adaptec AHA-2940 AU (for a scanner) <PCI 3> HSP56 Micromodem <PCI 4> Windows XP Pro SP1, DirectX 9.0b, all latest patches, all latest drivers

Michael George · Oct 3, 2003

The old NF7-S BIOSes caused corruption with two drives on the SATA controller. If you don't have the latest BIOS, update to it and do a new install. Mine works fine with no corruption as I updated immediately when I bought it.

"Abit User" wrote:

Hello folks. I built a new system with an NF7-S motherboard a few days ago, and have two drives in it...a Western Digital SATA drive on the first channel (which is my boot drive) powered by a legacy power connector, and

a

Maxtor ATA-133 drive on the second channel, using a Serilill adapter. I'm running a clean install of XP sp1 with all latest drivers, including the newest driver for the SATA controller.

I'm fairly new to SATA technology, so bear with me if I'm missing some obvious things. I'm noticing that when I try to do two data transfer operations between them at once (in my case, copying documents between two directories while transferring some pictures from some others), the operation crashes and corrupts a lot of the data. It's fine as long as I only do one thing at a time, but it's data corruption and a lengthy session of Chkdsk if I try to do two. In games, I'm seeing a 'stutter' that could be attributed to drive access issues as well.

I notice that XP detects the drives as SCSI drives, when they're really

not.

One option that comes to mind is on the 'SCSI Properties' sheet in device manager for the drives, there are checkboxes for 'disable tagged queuing' and 'disable synchronous transfers'. Would checking these off be

advisable?

Is this something that can be caused by using the standard power connector on the drive instead of the SATA power connector? Or is it perhaps just a bad drive (or bad controller on the motherboard)? The older Maxtor drive with the adapter seems to be a lot more stable than the new WD drive, but then again all the transfers have tended to be Maxtor --> WD, so the WD drive is being stressed more.

As a side note, the 'stutter' problem in games is almost completely alleviated by removing my new FX 5600 video card and putting in my older Ti-4200 card. I don't know if this is due to less demand on the system or what, but thought I'd include this information as possibly relevent.

...

TomG · Oct 3, 2003

XP sees the controller as a SCSI device just because it is not a regular IDE controller and has raid capability (if I am not mistaken...). do you monitor temperatures during these dual transfer sessions? does the system actually crash out of XP or just the application that is doing the transfer?

there is nothing inherent in SATA transfers that should cause this issue unless you have a problem with a cable or the Serillel adapter that is in use is defective and if it were, then *all* transfers, not just transfers under a heavy load, would be suspect.

I would not be messing with the SCSI properties sheet but even if you did, I'm not sure it would have an impact. you can certainly test that theory.

TomG · Oct 3, 2003

good to know...

Abit User · Oct 3, 2003

The old NF7-S BIOSes caused corruption with two drives on the SATA controller. If you don't have the latest BIOS, update to it and do a new install. Mine works fine with no corruption as I updated immediately when I bought it.

I tried updating my BIOS, but is says it is already the most current when I'm using the utility from the Abit site. I don't see anything more recent than July, has there been an update released elsewhere?

Lloyd

Wayne Youngman · Oct 4, 2003

"Abit User" wrote

Hello folks. I built a new system with an NF7-S motherboard a few days ago, and have two drives in it...a Western Digital SATA drive on the first channel (which is my boot drive) powered by a legacy power connector, and

a

Maxtor ATA-133 drive on the second channel, using a Serilill adapter. I'm running a clean install of XP sp1 with all latest drivers, including the newest driver for the SATA controller.

Hi,

I am using the NF7-S v2.0 with 2 x 120GB WD-Se SATA drives, set-up as RAID-0 (16k stripe) and so far it has worked perfectly! I do not use the latest BIOS (mine is #14). Obviously your set-up is a little different from mine and I suspect that the Maxtor drive with the Serielle adapter is your problem. I can't back this information up right now, but as I have said previously there is a problem using a Maxtor IDE drive and the Serielle converter. Others have said this problem is fixed now, but I'm not so sure, something to do with a *Marvel* converter chip in the Serielle I think. . .

--oZ-- · Oct 5, 2003

A few bios releases back (v14) they introduced a fix for data corruption when using raid-0 on sata.

However they did add some infomation in the release notes which may be useful for your situation:
"
1.. Fixed SATA RAID-0 data corruption issue by adding a new option "EXT-P2P's Discard Time" in "integrated Peripherals". The default setting is "30 us" ; which is recommended by NVidia. In case the problem is still there, try "1 ms" please. "

Full bios info is available at the abit site.

"Abit User" wrote:

Hello folks. I built a new system with an NF7-S motherboard a few days ago, and have two drives in it...a Western Digital SATA drive on the first channel (which is my boot drive) powered by a legacy power connector, and

a

Maxtor ATA-133 drive on the second channel, using a Serilill adapter. I'm running a clean install of XP sp1 with all latest drivers, including the newest driver for the SATA controller.

I'm fairly new to SATA technology, so bear with me if I'm missing some obvious things. I'm noticing that when I try to do two data transfer operations between them at once (in my case, copying documents between two directories while transferring some pictures from some others), the operation crashes and corrupts a lot of the data. It's fine as long as I only do one thing at a time, but it's data corruption and a lengthy session of Chkdsk if I try to do two. In games, I'm seeing a 'stutter' that could be attributed to drive access issues as well.

I notice that XP detects the drives as SCSI drives, when they're really

not.

One option that comes to mind is on the 'SCSI Properties' sheet in device manager for the drives, there are checkboxes for 'disable tagged queuing' and 'disable synchronous transfers'. Would checking these off be

advisable?

Is this something that can be caused by using the standard power connector on the drive instead of the SATA power connector? Or is it perhaps just a bad drive (or bad controller on the motherboard)? The older Maxtor drive with the adapter seems to be a lot more stable than the new WD drive, but then again all the transfers have tended to be Maxtor --> WD, so the WD drive is being stressed more.

As a side note, the 'stutter' problem in games is almost completely alleviated by removing my new FX 5600 video card and putting in my older Ti-4200 card. I don't know if this is due to less demand on the system or what, but thought I'd include this information as possibly relevent.

...