I have a WD Black model WD7501AALS-00E8B0 and after updating to Win 10 I have an issue I cannot flesh out. I will first list my system specs, then explain the issue, and then what I have done to try to root out the problem.
Q9400 OC 3.2ghz (2+ hours Stable in Prime95) water cooled
8GB GSkill DDR3
320 GB Hitachi HDD (System Drive)
Above mentioned WD Black 750gb
GTX 570HD (OC removed while diagnosing, driver version 361.43 [older driver explained below])
950 Watt PC Power & Cooling Silencer MkII
790i Ultra SLI EVGA MOBO
Win 10 Home (64)
I was running Vista with no issues what so ever and decided to upgrade to Win 10 to buy some more time out of an aging system, and to have a copy for the next build. I did a fresh install on a formatted Hitachi, but left my installs and data intact on the WD. Ever since I have been getting crashes related to Nvidia driver nvlddmkm, which is why I am on an older driver as I have tried quite a few and this is where I stopped when I realized this wasnt the issue.
Issue seems to be here - downloading or updating a file (such as a game) will crash the pc (nvlddmkm goes into a crash recover loop and both displays go into standby mode forcing me to hard reset the pc). I have transferred over 50 GB on and off of the drive without problem, and can install the same file on the Hitachi drive and update it with no problems.
I did the long format on the WD drive to no avail. I tried changing SATA ports, SATA cables, port+cable combo, and even tried moving the drive into a Windows managed Storage Space just to try everything I can think of. Crashes all the same.
Stress tests on the GPU and the CPU of over 2 hours came out perfect. No overheating, no artifacts, Prime95 ran perfect, WDC’s Lifeguard Diagnostic has both drives in perfect health (quick and long diagnostics, SMART status is perfect). Windows reports no problems other than the event viewer showing the crashes and force restarts I have already mentioned.
Again, if I install the same exact file, and update (in this case a random MMO of 9gb in size) on the WD drive, it wont finish before it crashes. When I do the same exact operation on the system Hitachi drive, it goes off without a hitch. The WD is meant as my media and gaming drive, and while Steam runs fine, it cannot install or update any games without crashing the PC since I have it on the WD drive.
I am at wits end here. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
