Possible solution for freezing and other problems with caviar blacks (maybe others too)

[badsykes]

Hello

My rig:

940BE 3ghz

4gb ram

MA 790x UD3p

5850 1gb ram

Asus xonar dx

Wd 640AALS caviar black 640gb

Windows 7 x64, windows xp

I thought you guys need to know this…I had an over an year and half a problem that ruined my mental health durring using computer…Randomly my caviar black 640gb freezed.Sometimes after 5 minutes after windows loaded.Sometimes after 4-5hours of gaming.Some weeks never happened…After the freezing took place i get another 3seconds release where i can move access the hdd again…After another seconds the hdd freeze again until it freezed for good.Restarting the pc will not see the hdd anymore and the only solution was to move to other sata port…Slowly after many repeated freezing the hdd begins to fail…The lifeguard tests begin to fail.

After 1 year i decide to rma the drive and WD droped me the latest 1tb revision of Caviar black.First weeks ok…Then same problems again…there was a week that after 5 minutes after entering in windows freezed…Just browsing or leting the pc idle.

WD and noone else could provide me with a solution i begin to think either changing to intel platform either switching to a samsung drive.One day i was looking after deactivating NCQ (even if was in IDE mode) and i discovered this option and i gave it a try…

So right click on the hdd in device manager.Go to properties.Then go to policies.THere are two options 1 is checked, one is unchecked (at least at me)

The second one that was unchecked  is called “turn off windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device”

From that day i never had a freeze in any condition anymore…

I hope this will help others…I didn’t saw any worse behaviour by activating this or less performance…

No more pain with hdd

[kdecgp]

What exactly did you do here? Did you uncheck both or none? 

I can’t seem to find anything that would let me start a new thread but I’m at my wit’s end on this HD problem.  I joined just to posit this to the actual company.

I have a major problem with my WD Black  500GB internal where I can’t transfer data over 400MB from my C drive(Caviar Blue 250) to my E(Caviar Black 500).  Can’t save large files to it from the internet, can’t put things on it from DVD/CD drive. I can view any media I have on it already, any game installed runs fine, but if I try to install anything new on it or move things from my C drive to it it’ll freeze and hang my PC.  It worked for about a month with no real problems.  I built my PC in May.

A bad drive really shouldn’t let you play Mass Effect 2 for 3 hours straight right?  Seems like BS if I can play an PC intense game like that but can’t transfer a folder full of MP3s.

I’m on Win7 64.  The thing that really ticks me off is that sometimes the drive works perfectly.  I transferred 20 gigs of stuff on the 18th last month.  But it’s only once in a blue moon where it’s seems to want to work.  Any other time if I go to move files it’ll hang and I have to do a hard reset. 

Lifeguard diagnostic says both drives are in tip top shape.  After crashing, Event Viewer gives no repeatable  errors to follow up on.  What should I be looking for?  Both these drives were OEMs from Newegg.  I just wish it would either work all the time or just finally explode.  I really dread using it for anything because it just fills me with dread.  I really wish I could use all my available hard drive space.  It really stinks that I have to rely on my 250 which I wanted to just use for my OS and basic programs.

[badsykes]

The first from above was checked by default but the second not.I checked the second because i felt it has something to do with buffering and now is working…

Your problem is even more weird…

Write your complete rig pls.