Serial ATA Troubles
Recently, my computer has been having troubles. The "hard drive not responding" kind. My computer was randomly freezing or hanging for a minute or two at a time. Sometimes, it would never come back and I'd have to do a hard reboot and then a disk scan. (Sometimes the disk scan would freeze too.) After getting back into Windows, the system event log would show an error from UlSata: The device, \Device\Scsi\UlSata1, did not respond within the timeout period. Yikes. Never heard of a hard drive simply not responding.
So I started looking on google. Searching for "UlSata1" returns NOTHING. So no hope there. I started reading about Serial ATA, and it seems that some people are having trouble with SATA drives because they're new and apparently the cables can be somewhat noisy. Also, it seems some of the SATA controllers aren't that great yet. I flashed my BIOS to get the latest SATA controller, and that didn't really help. Next I took the SATA cable I was using out and replaced it with the other one I have. I also reseated most of the connections in the case. Seems to work beautifully again. :) I'm glad I don't have to contact Maxtor and get a replacement drive.
This entry brought to you in the hope it proves useful for someone having the same troubles as I did.
Update: I was so excited that my drive was working well again (drastically improving the performance of my machine) that I started a stress test. Compiling with -j4, running ten programs, etc. *DING* Windows Hard Error *DING* Windows Hard Error *DING* Windows Hard Error. Then all of the programs started failing, saying they couldn't access the disk. O_o Now the drive doesn't show up in my BIOS, but it works in Windows... Maybe I'll have to call Maxtor after all...
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I've unfortunately had nothing but bad experiences with Maxtor. One day, my maxtor HD just spontaneously went bad - bad sectors just randomly appeared in files, and windows would hard lock for a few seconds every time one of the files was accessed. The only reason I even knew was because one of the files with a bad sector in it was set as one of my system sounds (menu popup, I believe). No warnings, no error messages, and the NTFS BadCluster table had nothing in it. Using recovery software let me get some of my data off it, and also showed that it had assloads of bad sectors. A friend of mine who's been building machines professionally for about 10 years says that Maxtor drives have a set of 'backup clusters' that they replace bad clusters with behind the scenes. Apparently they do this so that when a luddite buys a hard disk it doesn't come with scary 'bad clusters' on it. Of course, this seems to make it impossible for the OS to find out about bad clusters, and it means that once you run out of backups you're screwed.
I eventually got Maxtor to send me a replacement, but the replacement died a week later.
I use Western Digital exclusively now. The only reason I didn't lose everything to the stupid Maxtor drive is because I had two drives in my system (one happened to be a WD, actually.) Haven't had any trouble with my WDs.
Well, it's a good thing I just ordered a Western Digital. ;)
AFAIK, all drives do bad block recovery internally. So it's not that bad of a thing. (Or maybe it is, but it's not Maxtor alone who does that.)
That said, this is my first Maxtor to ever die, and I have a lot. I had an IBM Deskstar GXP once, but it went kablooey on me. :(
I have the same problem here with 4 Maxtors (6Y160M0) building a Software Raid 5 on Windows 2003 Server. (Promise S150 TX4 Sata Controller)
(Event Type: Error Event Source: UlSata Event Category: None Event ID: 9 Date: 04.07.2004 Time: 08:43:11 User: N/A Computer: BELIAL Description: The device, \Device\Scsi\UlSata1, did not respond within the timeout period.)
I'm having problems figuring out which drive is affected. Is UlSata1 the first drive on the controller? (or would that be UlSata0?)
To exclude wiring problems I bought 4x 1m ICP cables so I think the wiring is ok. I haven't recognized freezing problems yet, but I use the machine as a file server, so I don't actually work on it directly.
This is the second time I got this error in the event log, the first was a few months ago.
I haven't figured out the cause of the problem yet, so I would be pleased if anyone has some hints for me.
Cheerio B. (from Germany, so please excuse my english ;)
I'm glad putting my problem on the web helped connect two people with the same problem. :)
UlSata1 is the first drive, I think... I found that the drive simply had a faulty controller or something. I ran a SMART diagnostic tool and found that it had recorded several errors: You can download SpeedFan or diskcheckup and check yourself if you want. I ended up returning my drive and getting a replacement. The new one works fine. (For now. I'm certainly not putting that model as my primary anymore. I bought a SATA Western Digital instead.)
Good luck!