Should I run my sinle SATA disc as RAID?

[FlakMagnet]

Hi.

I am having a problem (BSOD) when I defrag the disc in Windows XP. I have reported this to Abit support, and they suggest I change the SATA Mode from IDE to RAID in the BIOS!

Does this make any sense?

Also support said that when I do this, I will not be able to boot into Windows! If I do change as they suggest, do I need to reinstall Windows afterwards?

The system runs perfectly apart from the defrag crashes.

The BSOD shows STOP 0x000000F4.

Thank for any helps.

 

[FlakMagnet]

Thanks for the feedback.

I've always worried about disc fragmentation (stems from years ago when it had a large impact on performance). I have purchased Diskeeper 10 Pro, and I like to keep my discs defragmented as much as possible.

I have also noticed that at work (I am a software engineer), that my PC needs a good defrag every now and then, and I do notice the performance gains after do this.

I have tried the XP defragger, and both this and Diskeeper cause a BSOD. Sometimes they run for about a minute before a crash, and other times it crashes in a much shorter time.

I have installed the latest SATA drivers from nVidia (I think they are version 6.91). These came on the motherboard CD.

Any ideas?

 

[FlakMagnet]

I have not run memtest on this rig yet, but I have run Orthos overnight without any issues. Do I need to try memtest if Orthos is OK?

I downloaded the Western Digital diagnostic software yesterday. I ran both a simple test and a more exhaustive test on the drive. Both showed no errors. So to me, this is sounding like a driver issue (as it only causes problems when in Windows). Not sure if that theory is sound though

The sound the drive makes when it's running the diagnostic tests is quite scary though! Sounds like it's really hammering it!

 

[FlakMagnet]

Thank ByteJuggler

Think I will do a boot time filesystem check - have not tried this yet.

I do find it strange that support would suggest changing to RAID, but I guess I do get different drivers doing that - I would be using RAID drivers instead of the drivers I am currently using - so that might change things for me...

Unfortunately, I don't have spare space or software to ghost my drive, but my build is fairly new, and I could suffer the pain of a complete reinstall if it fixes the issue. But if it doesn't, I still have the same problem, and I'm back to reinstalling everything again

I think I have the latest drivers for the chipset and peripherals. I used the disc that came with the mobo, and this contained the same nForce drivers that nVidia are showing as 'current' on their web site.

It's strange how others with this board are not having the same issue though... maybe they are all running single-disc RAID setups?