One last thought, hitting the send to quickly. If the machine dual 
boots, what happens with Linux??

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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