SATA drives acting up, is Nforce to blame?

[Franc Zabkar]

Which is why I suspect it's a chipset issue. This same drive was error
free prior to the addition of the second drive. The two drives are
actually the exact same model of 640GB WD drive, although the SATA#1 is
a revision or two newer.

I can't see how a motherboard chipset can cause a drive to have
internal read errors. I can see potential issues with the
UDMA_CRC_Error_Count attribute, though.

Both drives are now unable to complete SMART reads, ...

Very strange.

... so I'm going to RMA
them both. But first I'm gonna get the data off of both of them, so I
bought a third drive, a Hitachi 1TB to hold their data. After I RMA
them, I'll sell them both off without even opening their anti-static bags.

Yousuf Khan

- Franc Zabkar

 

[Arno]

I can't see how a motherboard chipset can cause a drive to have
internal read errors. I can see potential issues with the
UDMA_CRC_Error_Count attribute, though.

I agree on both counts. The CRC-Error attribute is about interface
errors and these can be cause both by the (chipset-integrated) controller
and the disk.

Very strange.

From my experience, the strangest behaviour is tyopically an unstable
PSU. A dying chipset may have similar effects, but it will stop
working soon. An unstable PSU can keepo going for months, sometimes years.

Well, I doubt this will solve the problem, but post here what
happens with new disks. I (and others here) have been wrong before on
things that looked clear-cut.

Arno

 

[Arno]

It may of course be that there is a grey area in the SATA
spec, and that becomes an issue wuth its chipset
implementation.
The SATA specs are far from light bedtime reading.

Indeed. And there may be an obscure firmware bug that allows
the chipset to create bad sectors. Highly unlikely, but
after the last f***up with Seagate firmware (a beginner-level
mistake IMO), I am not ruling anything out.

Arno

 

[Eric Gisin]

It may of course be that there is a grey area in the SATA
spec, and that becomes an issue wuth its chipset
implementation.
The SATA specs are far from light bedtime reading.

If the drive is doing a write, and the host controller hangs before data transfer is complete,
the drive will abort the write. It may mark the sector bad as a indication of this.