EX58- Extreme +AHCI + Western Digital Black edition 640 error

[The Dirk Diggler]

Howdy.

My 1st post here and i have been getting very frustrated.

I was running 2 x 320 black edition WD hard drives without fault for 12 months. then i decided to update to the new generation black edition drives and got a single 640 drive untill SSD's became a good value price point.

When i plugged the 640 black in (After removing the 2 x 320) the system locks up on the Intel AHCI detection screen.
This has done the same thing when raid is turned on as well.
Unplug the drive, AHCI goes thru the dection fine, plug back in, locks up.

I have tried the drive in another gigabyte system with achi and raid turned on and no isssues.

Im trying to do a fresh install of win 7 X64, but am unable to do anything with this drive.

i was running F12 bios rev and just updated to F13 beta to no effect.

i have aslo set all settings back to default,

system specs are


GA- EX58 Extreme rev 1
Intel i920 D) stepping
corsair ddr3 1600 (6 x 2 gig)
corsair 100 psu
pioneer dvdr dv-117

[absic]

Hi,

Is the WD 640GB the SATA3 6GB/s version?

[The Dirk Diggler]

Sata 3  edition.

Don't you hate when you read your previous notes and find spelling mistakes and errors.

[absic]

Keep it short then it's harder for errors to creep in.... that's what I keep telling my wife but I'm sure she doesn't believe me! 

OK after a little humour back to your problem. I too have a couple of these Western Digital Caviar Black SATA3 640GB Hard-drives and, to be honest, it's most probably the cause of your problem. I cannot use these drives in RAID or AHCI mode without the system falling over and have only been able to run with them in IDE Mode. Although they are SATA3 they are actually slower than my Hitachi SATA2 drives and I won't be buying them again.

If you set-up your system to run in Native IDE Mode then you shouldn't have a problem, or RMA the HDD and get something that is more reliable.

[Dark Mantis]

Absic and I were both caught out with buying a pair of these drives with a mind to RAID them. Apparently as I found out afterwards they are not meant for installing RAID on because that don't have TLER. You have to buy the Enterprise versions if you want to RAID them. Small print

[The Dirk Diggler]

I swapped the drive over and it detects fine nearly.

A few times i have noticed it will stutter.

Soon as i put my old ud4p board over it detects fine.
I had no intention of raiding this drive, as it was un upgrade from my older version black servers, but with the infomation you have given me, it might be better to update to server edition than keep trying to muck around with it

[Dark Mantis]

If you are not RAID arraying your drives try setting the BIOS to IDE rather than AHCI. You will find it is more stable and there is little performance hit. All you really lose is the hotswap ability.

[The Dirk Diggler]

I will try that. i can keep the marvell as ahci to access my external drive.

[The Dirk Diggler]

That has fixed the issue with hard disk, thanks for the tip

[Dark Mantis]

Only too happy to help.