Hi, Just wondered if anyone had had similar experiences as me regarding a P4P800 raid setup. I got two new Samsung Spinpoint SATA150 160Gig HD's the other day and have set up a RAID 0 with my Windows install on it. It was running fine until yesterday but then I noticed that my comp kept freezing and each time it did the HD's made a slight clunk noise as if they were parking the heads. This happened several times and each time the PC completely froze and all downloads suspended. Anyway, eventually I rebooted and when I cam back into Windows I had lost some data. I ran diskCheck and it found loads of corruption but thankfully retrieved most of my files. Since then I have been running the PC fine with no problems at all. I have run disk check again and it found no problems and didn't report any duff sectors on the disk. I have two questions. Firstly, has anyone had any problems like this with a ICH5R controller before? Secondly, could this be caused by a power/heat problem. I have a 500W PSU but its a cheap qtec and not great. I also have quiet a few fans but until yesterday no specific cooling for the HD's. I've just added another case fan in the HD bay. I'm obviously worried now about putting critical data on the drive in case it happens again. Any help greatly appreciated.
I've had this problem on a completely different setup with 2 different hard drives but I'm still not quite sure what was wrong or how I fixed it but some things did help: The first time I had the problem of the "clicking" and crashing my graphics card was faulty (no idea why this would be). It stopped when I put a different card in. I've had this problem with a sata drive with a loose cable, if the cable go jogged slightly it would cause the "clicking" noise and windows could crash. Another occasion a pata drive was playing up, so I tried using a sata adapter and plugging it into the sata controller and the clicking stopped. Oddly enough I moved it back to the ide channel a few weeks later and it worked fine. Finally, I had this problem when one of my hdds was dying Sorry, this information probably isn't too useful but thought I'd share my annoying experience of clicking/clunking hdds
Thanks for your reply. Good to hear that there are things which can cause this other than just dying HD's. I've been running it for 24 hours solid now and no problems but I think I'll keep an eye on it before I put anything too critical on it. I have heard that setting the memory latencies too tightly can cause problems with raid setups. I'm running low latency memory so maybe that would be something to try if it happens again.. Other than that the only thing I can think of is changing the PSU.... I've been wanting to buy one that doesn't sound like a vacume cleaner for ages so this is a good excuse.
On a totally random note, do you have a sound card in the 3rd PCI slot from the top? I've seen (and heard of) hard drive corruption on several different ASUS boards because there was a sound card (usually a Creative Labs Sound Blaster of some sort) in slot #3.
No, I use the onboard soundcard but I did notice yesterday that when I'm playing MP3's, the computer has started making little click/popping noises and stuttering ever so slightly. Not noticed this before now. I'm getting a new Zalman ZM400B so hopefully that'll sort things out.
