Topic: Constatnt Drive Access on Gigabyte board

[Louie]

Here is the thread for my build and a few problems I had with it. All which were resolved.

http://forum.pctweakr.com/index.php/topic,471.0.html

But, the PC gods not being happy with me being happy, threw a spanner into the works. At least is was a right handed adjustable spanner.  

I began to have these constant drive accesses. It started out small and infrequent and then began to be constant. The heads were always moving on the drive and in a loud manner. Loud enough to really begin to piss me off. Honestly, had the Seagate been whisper silent about this, I would never had suspected there was a problem.

Without getting into the gory details of uninstalling and reinstalling drivers and software ( never trust ATI drivers ) I discoverd the real culprit resided in the bios.  Two problems were found.

First, I had set up the boot disk and the DVD drive on the same IDE controller. So the same controller where doing the r/w for both drives, which now explains the slow access to the DVD when a disk was put into it. I moved the DVD to another controller and that solved that access rate and a bit of the noise.

The second problem were that the remaining SATA and GSATA ports were enabled. Once disabling those remaing ports, the entire system is once again whisper quite. 

[bigguy]

I wonder why disabling ports that are not being used would quiet things down. They should be being used at all if nothing is plugged into them.

[Louie]

My thoughts also Bigguy. Honestly it was a last ditch effort, if that had not worked I was going to look  at it being a faulty hard drive or motherboard. And it still may be one of those is faulty.

This whole process took about 4 nights of tinkering with. Putting in, taking out drivers, ESET Security Suite, disabling devices in Hardware and more. I was using the Sysinternal tools from MS because I really thought that I had some piece of software causing all this to happen.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb795533

A real handy one is the Process Exployer. Tells a lot about what is going on in the inner workins of the OS.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

I went about it fairly well disciplined and basically proved a number of times that the base XP OS with just the basic drivers installed or with devices disabled like the Realtec devices, I still had that constant drive access. Everytime the problem were those SATA ports not being disabled. When I disabled the unused ports, the drive access/noise ended. I tried a lot of different configurations of software and hardware to validate that. It really surprised me.

Anyway, this is my first ever Gigabyte board and my first time to use SATA ports so I went into this ignorant to some degree, but with a disciplined plan to figure out the problem. I looked for an official Gigabyte forum but did not find one. There is a UK Gigabyte forum that is quite nice but they are not associated with Gigabyte I do believe. Still, I should open a trouble ticket with Gigabyte just to see what they have to say.   

[bigguy]

I would open a ticket if for nothing else curiosity sake.