Windows 10 Hard Drive/Sata Controller issue

Soldato
Joined
24 Jul 2003
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Hello,
I upgraded to Windows 10 about a month ago from Windows 8.1 as thought it had been out long enough for most of the kinks to be gone and generally from XP to 7 to 8.1 I didn't have any issues.

Unfortunately Windows 10 isn't working quite as well as I would like, I am assuming this new issue is Windows 10 related as explained below:

I have 1 512GB SSD and 6 SATA drives in my main PC for media storage. 5 of these are connected via the motherboard and 2 are connected via a SATA PCI-E card I bought when I had Windows 8.1 along with 2 of the 6 hard drives (Toshiba 4TB). I never had any hard drive related issues before.

After upgrading to Windows 10 i've had a problem of restarting and shutting down taking ages, shut down 15-20 minutes, restart, I think I have only waited long enough for it to restart itself once and that was over 45 mins. However, my computer stays on 24/7 so after a few googles and no general luck I left it. Last few days however copying from a folder on my desktop to one of the other hard drives would take ages to start copying and same with deleting, frequently requiring me to manually refresh just to show the items gone/copied. Then after using Kodi the other day and accessing one of my Toshiba hard drives (connected to the SATA controller) folders it told me the directory wasn't there, went to my computer and despite the hard drive being there, the space of the media files being used (about 1TB) going into the drive there were no files, after a restart it worked as normal (and by restart the waiting for a bit then shut off via power button). It has happened another 2 times in as many days and just now, it also would not let me access the other Toshiba hard drive (connected via SATA card).

First thoughts were hard drives going, but unlikely as both are playing up, both are the newest and they just happened to be connected via this SATA card. So I would think SATA card except....at one point all the hard drives except C: just disappeared in my computer, after leaving it a few mins and File Explorer just seeming borked, reset and all fine and also, it hadn't actually done this for the first 3-4 weeks although I can't say I specifically remember accessing those drives (some media and files really just storage) but I did certainly copy files to them without incident.

So I'm not sure, with the delayed desktop performance, disappearing files (which upon doing an error check tells me there are errors on the drive but after reboot all fine) while the space is still being used, the hard drives aside from once dont seem to disappear just certain files/folders. Am leaning towards the SATA controller possibly needing a driver update but struggling to find out which card I bought but again as no conflicts in device manager I struggle to think this is the cause.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
 
a couple of diagnostic ideas -
- windows performance monitor to monitor shutdown ( have used it for startup)- also presumably system log shows nothing interesting ( what are services taking a long while to shut down )
- removing/eliminating some drives just to see if shutdown times change
- health reports for drives
- nothing up with power supply (any increased activity with 10 that might be stressing it)
 
Thanks for the reply, I did some investigation into Event Viewer and found a lot of 'user-mode driver crash' messages related to the hard drive conntected to the SATA PCI-E card. After a brief google it recommended the obvious reinstalling related drivers except my SATA card says on the website the drivers are included in all Windows versions.

Had a brief look through device manager, no red marks but then thought I would just take a look at all the installed programs and after looking noticed only the Intel Graphics Driver had installed which is odd as Windows Update on 8.1 would always grab the latest intel chipset drivers....so decided to download the Intel Driver tool and sure enough the chipset drivers weren't installed! Installing them immediately fixed my reboot/shutdown problems and the hard drives are showing as they should with all the copy/paste delays gone. They only seemeed to 'crash' when left for several hours without access so will have to leave overnight to see.

Bit of a noob mistake but my process has always just been to check Device Manager, no red marks no problems :p

'Hopefully' sorted but imagine it may catch a few people out.
 
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