M7557C locks up while accessing 2nd SATA drive

[hobbiworx]

I'm running Windows 7 on a M7557C. The O/S is loaded on the 320 GB SATA drive that came with the system. I have 2 SATA drives. Both show 100% health using Hard Drive Sentinel. If I hook one of them up via a 2nd SATA connector, data access works for a while then the system freezes and I have to use the power button to power down and reboot. CTRL-ALT-DEL will not work. Any ideas? My goal is to use eSATA drives for extra storage, but this problem causes me to be concerned that they may also lock up the system.

[Big_Dave · Accepted solution]

So your plan is to extend a mobo sata port to the back or or use an add-in card?

The M7557C has a VISTA nForce controller update so I wonder if there is a later update at the NVIDIA web site. Or try here.

I have extended a mobo sata port to the back on two of my PCs so that I can use esata drives.

[hobbiworx]

I would like to have higher speed for the external drives, but I don't think I can do it without using the PCIe slot, which is occupied. What I must do first, though, is find out what is going on with multiple SATA drives. That configuration has to work before I add external drives.

[Big_Dave]

I would agree with what you are saying.

Some of the older PCs have issue with large hard drives so I don't know if you are running into that issue on your PC or not.

What bios level is your PC at?

[hobbiworx]

The BIOS is version 3.10.

I have made progress. I updated the drivers and have had a WD 500GB SATA drive running for about 45 minutes without a lockup. It looks promising. The Hitachi 1TB drive failed quickly, even after updating the drivers. However, it passes the Hitachi extended diagnostics.