StyleBay second HD issue

[®®®]

sorry for being offtopic.

Has anybody in here experience with the Toshiba StyleBay HD adpater (part no. PA3223U-1ETC) with an attached TOSHIBA MK6021GAS 60 GB (FirmWare 13QG4544T)?

If so, do you also get Event ID 11 entries in the EventViewer/system and can reproduce the following issue?

I had the idea to post that cuz of the event id 45 topic and i thought i could unleash the power of 408 registered members and all passive readers for a issues that plagues me for months.

After weeks of researching, the ONLY information i could find was about ID 11, no word on WWW about StyleBay or Toshiba HD issue, so here the links i found so far:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314093

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=259237

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=154690

My entry looks like this:

Event ID: 11

Source: Disk

Description: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D

where D is the mentioned 2nd HD as one 60 GB NTFS partition on Secondary Channel as Master

On every access to that HD the entry is written in the EventViewer protocol and bad sectors are "produced", so the files become corrupt, which is not nice as you can image. Actually the whole HD is not usable :angry: , cuz of that issue.

I evolved a workaround :) , but that doesn't satisfy me , because the whole OS suffers. I have to disable DMAccess for the 2nd Channel Master of the Intel Storage Controller, so PIO is now active, which results in extreme LAG for the whole OS when accessing the disk :)

Anybody has clue who is blamable for that error/corruption of files? HD Firmware, StyleBay firmware (if there is one), Intel Storage driver or even MS atapi.sys which is listed as driver for Secondary Channel?? Maybe a new BIOS for 5205 is needed. I really dont' have clue, where normally i have, as you know me.

[Dakotah]

I don't have any specific answers to your problem, I can only share my experience with my Stylebay issues.

I originally purchased my Stylebay without a HDD and used my IBM Travelstar 4GB (IC25N040ATCS04-0) in it. I had all sorts of trouble at first. :o I did not buy my HD from Toshiba so I didn't have the nice rubber boot to put around my drive to keep it in place and Toshiba plays dumb when I try to buy one from them. The hard drive would not stay on the slide on connector (cheesy design) :) and when the connection would become intermittent I would get errors and lose data. I finally resorted to wrapping the HD in a tissue and packing it into the Stylebay so it could not move. I also crimped the pins a bit to force better contact with the cheesy connector. It worked in the sense that I no longer had problems with the drive sliding off the connector, but I could not get the drive to operate in anything other than PIO mode. Writing to the D drive was agonizingly slow. I finally gave up and lived with that solution for over a year.

The orginal HITACHI_DK23EA-60 HDD that came with my laptop has been flaky from the start. It developed bad blocks almost immediately and the bad block count has continued to grow. Even with an extended warranty, Toshiba refuses to replace the drive. :angry:

Recently, when I rebuilt my laptop to experiment with new video drivers, I used the 40GB IBM Travelstar HDD as my primary and put the 60GB Hitachi HDD in the Stylebay. To my amazement, BOTH HDD's now are running in Ultra DMA mode 5 which dramatically improves the overall performance of my laptop. :P I don't have any idea why reversing the HDD setup worked that way, but I will certainly be leaving it in that configuration. I still get block errors on the 60GB drive, but I attribute that to the Bad Block issue that I have had from the start on that drive.

Toshiba has no answers as to why this configuration works and the reverse does not. They still refuse to acknowledge that there is an issue with their HDD's or their Stylebay. Of course, they also refuse to acknowledge the problems I am having with my power connector as well. :angry: I do have a case number to have the built-in ethernet repaired, but cannot seem to find the time to be able to part with my laptop long enough to send it in for repair. :)

One question... Do you have the Stylebay drive optimized for quick removal or for performance?