Another thought, is the power supply adequate. Even then if it's not a 
energy saving power supply, might consider swapping it out. I did 
recently and the Kiil-a-Watt said the new on 12 hours a day would take 2 
or 3 years to pay the $70 cost for around 450 watts. The old one was 350 
watts, and cheaper power supplies are out there, but they use a lot more 
power.

XP should wait till there is drive ready, it does that also with DVD, 
CD, floppies, etc. Might see what the reaction is with SATA connected, 
but not power. SATA is supposedly hot swap. Maybe someone else can 
comment on if it is safe to have SATA connected and plug/unplug the 
power. The IDE and floppies have a drive ready signal, don't know how 
SATA handles that.

Googled SATA Drive Ready, here's one
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-raid@vger.kernel.org/msg04257.html

Note possible bad cable issue!

On 3/30/2010 1:36 PM, Carl Denk wrote:
> In XP (Classic Menu)
> Start>  Settings>  Control panel>  Power Options>  Turn Off Hard Disks
> (Many settings from Always On - 3 minutes)
>
> On 3/30/2010 1:01 PM, Dr Skip wrote:
>    
>> Update... looking at event logs and listening, it seems to be an issue when the
>> drive needs to spin up. Drives in there now use much less power than the orig
>> one. Maybe not a power issue?
>>
>> Leaving them spinning seems to not exhibit the problem. Is this a general SATA
>> behavior? XP fault? Certain hw designs badly done?
>>
>> Vol ID doesn't seem to be an issue. Speed negotiation possibly (if they negotiate)?
>>
>> BTW, is there a tool to manually send a spin down cmd to the disk for XP?
>> Searched but no luck. It might help diagnosing if I can tie spin up/down
>> definitively to the event, rather than waiting for the kernel to decide.
>>
>> -Skip
>>
>> On 3/30/2010 11:31 AM, Dr Skip wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> I've got what may be a hardware or architecture issue that I'm at a loss
>>> for even where to start looking.
>>>
>>> I'll start with some questions. Hopefully the answers will show me the
>>> error of my ways.
>>>
>>> 1) Will SATA drives and interfaces work with whatever speeds are
>>> available and negotiate? In other words, if a drive (or 2) are different
>>> speeds than the speed of the controller (capability) will it still work
>>> well (via negotiation), or do they have to match.
>>>
>>> 2) Will a SATA controller support more than 2 channels, or is it
>>> possible to design it such. That isn't possible with PATA master/slave.
>>>
>>> 3) With XP, if one used Linux (clonezilla for instance) to clone the
>>> first drive (C), then installed it as a second (D), both vol IDs would
>>> be the same. This works (in other words, it boots and reads/writes) but
>>> will the system exhibit transient problems, conflicts, etc?
>>>
>>> In a nutshell, the system in question has 2 SATA drives of a faster
>>> variety than orig. It appears to have 4 channels on the primary
>>> controller (CD is on it too), and all works well until the second cloned
>>> drive is on for a while. Eventually some access causes it to drop one or
>>> both drives out of DMA mode to PIO mode. This indicates windows got an
>>> error reading. I've just tested #3 by changing the drive ID, but no joy.
>>> Perhaps someone has greater insights on this?
>>>
>>> It could be a limitation of the architecture of the particular hardware
>>> design perhaps, a speed issue, a vol ID issue, or something else. It
>>> might also be a spinup issue. Both new drives are from the same mfg as
>>> the orig, but are 3Gb/s rather than the orig 1.5Gb/s.
>>>
>>> BTW, DMA mode gives about 100+MB/s performance, PIO<8MB/s. It isn't an
>>> option...
>>>
>>> Does this sound familiar to anyone? ANY pointers as I grope around
>>> without bus analyzers or driver source code?
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>> -Skip
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>        
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