Funny SATA controller on the GA-P35

Hi,
I'm having this strange issue with the Gigabyte (Purple) SATAII controller(s) on my Gigabyte P35-DS4.

I dual boot Gentoo Linux and Window Vista and my system mostly ran stable, but every now and then I would have this issue where Windows would fail to boot, or it would boot, but very slowly. To be more specific the hard drive would seem to experience these stalls and would freeze for a period of 60 seconds, and then resume activity like there was no interruption, then after a few seconds of the hard drive spinning it would do the same thing and lock up again for 60 seconds.
Strangely enough I was always able to boot into linux without any strange issues and it seemed that after some time the windows booting problem would just go away, only to return a week or two later.

After replacing the hard drive and switching the SATA cable I thought everything was fine, but the problem started happening again a few days ago. After plugging my SATA cable into the yellow port the problem instantly went away and windows was able to run smoothly again, so I think it must be a problem with the gigabyte sata controllers, yet I wonder how they could be faulty and work for weeks without problems.

The 60 second pauses seem like windows is blocking the hard drive for some reason, which linux obviously isn't doing, or maybe the timeouts are just not noticeable in linux. I don't think it can possibly be a problem with windows because the hard drive lockups actually occurred once during the windows installer.

Has anyone else had any similar issues with the purple sata ports?

Cheers

never read of that happening but that port is from a addin chip. more then likly the Jmicron controller, you more then likly need to update the driver for the sata device. the only other thing might be is if your ocing your rig and the pcie speed is not set or hard locked. that is if the pcie contoler is on the pcie buss but i thought i read they were on the pci buss still.

Thanks for your reply.
I have install the latest gigabyte mobo drivers.
The PC isn't overclocked either.

could you list what drivers you installed? also mobo sites dont always list the most update drivers for the compents. here is jmicron's site go thru it and find the drivers for that controller its using.
http://www.jmicron.com/
i spent a good 10mins looking on gigabyte's and at reviews of the board. none of them list the controller model being used on it. that makes it so much harder to make sure you get the right drivers...

I think purple connectors use gigabyte's raid drivers.

Yes, the two purple ones are for the gigabyte controller. And the six yellow is (ich9r).

I've googled about the gigabyte controller a couple of months ago and i've read some ppl have problem with it. Making the harddrives freeze for a sec or more.

The drivers for it seems poor also, gigabyte hasn't done anything about that problem in their drivers yet. Thou i don't think anyone has actually mailed gigabyte, telling about this problem.

As i don't think many users is using more than total of 6 harddrives or CD/DVD's togheter with the MB, making the users Not connecting to the gigabyte controller and only use the yellow ones and never see the problem.

skill you have them backwards... the jmicron is the 2 purple ones aka the gigabyte raid.. the yellow ones are the ICH9R(intel Southbridge). do me a favor with the giga-raid drivers installed look in the system hardware section in windows. could you take ss's of the tabs for the properties of that device?

Hehe thanks, i just typed jmicron in, but i didn't see that i actually put the word in there, lol Ofcourse it's like that!

I have the giga-controller disabled in BIOS so i don't have it installed at all, if you where asking me, hehe

lol ok just checking! would you be willing to do that though? reinstall the drivers and stuff so i can take a peek?

Sure, that would be no problem at all, thou i gotta go right about now, bad timing
But if you still want a peak in a couple of hours i'll do that for you! np!

yea thats cool im actually heading to bed soon so no rush..

Hehe, i guess this is what you wanna see.

yea thats it..
these are the drives i would like ya to try... stay away from the gigabyte drivers.. since they just slap there logo on the installer when they get it from the like of intel and such.
ftp://driver.jmicron.com.tw
where you need to get to get the newest drivers for those 2 purple ports.