muenchris

I have a strange problem, maybe somebody can help me with:

I have attached four harddrives on a ASUS P5GD2 Deluxe Motherboard:
+ 3x SATA Drives + 1 USB2 External Drive (WD 250)
(1x 80GB for System and Boot -WD 10K RPM)
(1x 250GB WD for HDTV recording)
(1x 400GB Hitachi for HDTV storage)

All drives are fast and do not use much CPU except the 400GB Hitachi Drive

I change cables and put it on a different SATA connector - still the drive eats up 100% CPU Load (in the Kernel). It looks like the SATA driver for the motherboard was not written to be optimized for Hyperthreading because the CPU is only used by one of the HT virtual CPUs.

Still, the other SATA drives do not show this problem, I can copy large files (1Hour HDTV is about 8GB) from one drive to another with less than 10% CPU load. But as soon as I involve the 400GB Hitachi the time to copy goes up dramatically and the CPU is blocked.

Strange thing is that for a while it worked well (After some reboots).

I excluded heat problems, cable issues and everything else I could think of.

Right now my guess is that the drive has a bad on-board controller and I have to bring it back.....or does anybody have an idea what could cause this?


Chris Muench
eMVP