Here's the specs: Processor: Intel i7 875k Motherboard: MSI P55-GD80 Memory: Corsair Dominator 4x2GB (forget exact model, 1600mhz I believe, though) Graphics: Diamond AMD HD5870 1GB PSU: Antec Earthpower 750watt HDD: 4xWD black 500GB (WDC WD5001AALS-0) drives in raid 10(0+1 so says bios) mode Sound: On-board Realtek NIC: On-board Marvell DVD: Cheap Lite-On thingy, connected via sata I've spent a couple days trying to figure out what part went bad. At the bottom I'll list my entire debug procedure, but I'll get to the meat of the problem here. Rebooted this machine on sunday to find it took over an hour to boot up, no warnings in the logs about anything failing before hand, no updates, software, or drivers installed anytime recently. My testing actually shows that it seems to be the raid chip that’s gone slightly bad as well as windows drivers are failing on this hardware piece. I've run this machine from MiniXP, WinPE, Win7 Recovery Disc, ESET Recovery Disc. All have the same problem regardless of the raid driver I use- extremely slow access times and slow read speed. I decided to try a Linux distro, Knoppix, and, lo and behold, the drives run just like they're supposed to. Have a look- It seems I cannot post links yet. Windows MiniXP and HD Tune 2.55 (remove space after http)http ://s29.postimg.org/3xrbepvfb/hdtune.png On this one I’m not sure why it’s reading both volumes as 1, but its neither here nor there, as all windows kernel boots were the same speed, and the drives were accessible from windows explorer as separate, so the speed’s the important bit in that pic. And Knoppix palimpsest (remove space after http)http ://s9.postimg.org/ezoqocr1r/linux_hdd_test.png Now I can only figure the raid chip did die, at least a little, but somehow the Linux drivers are bypassing whatever function did fail. I may have missed something, but I'm unsure what, and I'd love some feedback to figuring this one out. The motherboard is literally 6 months out of warranty so RMA is out of the question. I don't know much about compiling my own drivers, so this kind of problem is quite beyond me. I'd love to save the board since I wasn't quite ready for an upgrade yet. And the boring part, my testing: First reboot, ran SpyBot, nothing wrong, antivirus timed out and would not load because drive access was too slow Made an ESET antivirus rescue disk, which runs from WinPE, set it to scan, cancelled after 19 hours and only about 20% of the drive scanned, no errors. Swapped sata cables, no change, swapped ports, no change, SMART scan, no problems. Fiddled bios settings a bunch, no difference Did a BIOS update from 1.0a to 1.0c, no change Made a Knoppix USB flash drive, found that a 51.5gb transfer was taking near the normal amount of time. Installed bit defender, scanned full drive, nothing suspicious. Made a MiniXP flash, retested the drive, still snail slow on a windows kernel. Ran HD Tune 2.55, recorded results, then loaded back up Knoppix for palimpsest, and recorded those. Additional info: I have also tried with and without the DVD drive in when I was swapping ports Drivers I’ve tried: MSI: 8.9.0.1023; 12.0.0.49974 Intel: 12.9.0.1001; 8.9.0.1023; 12.0.0.49974; 10.1.0.1008 Thanks for reading
Solved All right, went more into the SMART testing, turns out it was a harddrive. First SMART test passed, but went back and ran it again, and Data Lifeguard froze 5 times in a row trying to test it. Unplugged that drive and windows boots and everything works great. I wonder if Windows and Linux might be using different of the mirrored drives for reading? Interesting, but at least it's solved.
