GA-H67M-D2-B3: System Hangs with Old SATA Hard Drives

[knight1fox3]

Hello All,

I have a Gigabyte GA-H67M-D2-B3 (rev. 1.0) LGA1155 mobo with an Intel Pentium G620 dual-core CPU installed (F7 BIOS). I'm using a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD as my main OS drive. Win7 64-bit is installed and running fine. I have a couple of old 1st gen. SATA hard drives I want to also use with this system. Both are old-school Maxtor 160GB drives (will only use for storage). When I have them plugged in, the system boots up fine and recognizes the drives and assigns drive letters accordingly. After a certain time, the HDD busy light goes solid and the system becomes unresponsive. It doesn't matter which old Maxtor drive I have plugged in, this happens with one or both plugged in. I can unplug them with the PC on and the system operates as normal again. And with just my SSD plugged in, this doesn't happen at all. Could this be an issue with drive indexing within Win7 for the old drives or having the SATA interface configured as AHCI? I'm using the SATA 3 GB/s ports for everything. Any feedback/suggestions on what I could do to fix this would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Other details: 8GB DDR3 GSkill memory installed; using onboard Intel HD graphics

 

[redduc900]

Try connecting the SSD to the SATA 6Gb/s port, and the HDDs to the 3Gb/s ports (H67 controller), or vice versa. Then set the individual controllers to either AHCI or IDE mode, AHCI for the controller the SSD is connected to, and IDE for the controller the HDDs are connected to.

 

[knight1fox3]

Try connecting the SSD to the SATA 6Gb/s port, and the HDDs to the 3Gb/s ports (H67 controller), or vice versa. Then set the individual controllers to either AHCI or IDE mode, AHCI for the controller the SSD is connected to, and IDE for the controller the HDDs are connected to.

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure the Gigabyte BIOS allows the individual controllers to be set the way you are describing (see screenshot below). What I decided to try is setting the PCH SATA Control Mode to "AHCI" and the SATA Port0-3 Native Mode to "Disabled". I will continue to monitor and see if that makes any difference. Unless there are any other suggestions for different settings I should try.

 

[knight1fox3]

Hate to bump this. Still having the problem though even with the settings mentioned above. Found out something more though, whenever I run windows update, I notice that on one of the non-system drives, temporary install folders are being created and the update hangs. Why wouldn't those be created on the system drive? Just wondering if that has something to do with it. Any further comments/suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[knight1fox3]

UPDATE: Chalk it up to old 1st gen. SATA drives not playing nice with new hardware. I swapped out the two old drives for a newer 80GB I had laying around and the problem went away. Just odd that it happens with both the drives as opposed to just one of them.