Apr 6, 2020
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The hard-drive is an 8TB SeaGate.

Some background: I had a thing called Intel Optane which, when it worked, it worked great. It's basically a little PCI memory stick that attaches itself to the HDD in a RAID setup to increase its speed to those comparable to an SSD. But anyway, in January the Optane started having problems. The Intel software started reporting it as faulty and prone to imminent failure, and I started getting that "hardware failure is imminent, back up your data immediately" error every time upon launching Windows. I tested my HDD extensively at this point in time to ensure that it was the Optane and not the HDD.

Long story short, after a month or so of very irritating troubleshooting, I managed to fully uninstall Optane and separate it from the HDD completely, effectively converting my HDD from RAID to AHC. But at this point I hadn't taken it out of the system yet. I still had some weird issues, like occasional system freezes and this bizarre issue where I can't ever put my PC to sleep or shut it down after it's been on for an extended time without it freezing in the shutting down/sleep process and forcing a hard restart. So, after that, I removed the Optane stick from the system physically and it has seemingly been fine since. I have been even able to put my PC to sleep and shut down once more. And my event viewer has nowhere near the amount of errors it had in it before.

But, one day, I went to put the PC to sleep and it froze in the attempt like it used to. Except, this time, when I had to restart the PC I got the KERNEL DATA INPAGE ERROR blue screen of death. Initially I was worried but the PC restarted just fine and I ran an extensive chkdsk after (which passed and didn't find any errors) and hadn't had any problems since, until today that is. I wanted to test the sleep mode again and sure enough it did the same thing as I mentioned before, with the same BSOD error. Before I thought it was possible that it happened since that superfetch/sysmain process had just started right before the system went to sleep, but that wasn't the case this time so something else must be wrong.

ANYWAY, here are the things I have tried:
  • I have checked for SMART errors in SEVERAL programs and all report it as good/healthy (HDTune, HDiskSentinel, CrystalDiskInfo, Seatools)
  • I have done /sfc scannow and chkdsk /r /f, now two times, and they have yet to report any issue
  • Using SeaTools, I did a short generic test that passed, I checked for SMART errors and found none, and did a Short DST check. The Short DST check failed at 80% and is the only thing that has reported any issue for me, it suggested that there must be bad sectors. I did the long generic test afterward and let it run all night, and it also passed. So the DST was the only fail.
Do you think I should just cut my losses and toss the drive for a new one? I have my data backed up twice to an external since I do auto backups every week, so data loss isn't a concern. But at this point I'm sick of being irritated by this stuff and am getting the impression the drive is dying, but it's weird to me that only one thing out of dozens has been able to tell me something is off (and apparently it's hit or miss sometimes from what I read). So what should I do?
 
WIth quality NVRAM solutions at reasonable prices, i'd acquire one at least 500 GB in size, and ditch the optane, and fresh quick format the Seagate, as things might be 'jumbled' due to movement of files exclusively onto the Optane, etc...

If the Seagate has issues, those issues should show in CrystalDiskInfo...anything 'yellow' in status is a cause for concern...
 
Apr 6, 2020
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WIth quality NVRAM solutions at reasonable prices, i'd acquire one at least 500 GB in size, and ditch the optane, and fresh quick format the Seagate, as things might be 'jumbled' due to movement of files exclusively onto the Optane, etc...

If the Seagate has issues, those issues should show in CrystalDiskInfo...anything 'yellow' in status is a cause for concern...
I don't think a format will be necessary since deconcatenation is part of the uninstallation process for Optane, which puts the files back into their original place and prepares the Optane for removal/uninstall.

As for CrystalDiskInfo, that's what I thought. Everything has consistently come up good though.
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Apr 6, 2020
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Noticed I had some missing drivers, notably Intel's RST ones and some chipset ones. Since installing those it seems to be better, but I wouldn't be surprised if I have problems again. For now, sleep mode and shut downs work again. But of course I thought the system had been "fixed" before only to be disappointed, so we'll see what happens.
 
Apr 6, 2020
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Your data is backed up, correct?
From the opening post "I have my data backed up twice to an external since I do auto backups every week, so data loss isn't a concern."

For now while things do look fine I've turned off the auto backups since I have limited space and don't want the ones I know are good to be replaced with some that could have potentially lost data. I might do a clone sometime soon though, but if there's bad sectors not sure it would be worth it.
 
Apr 6, 2020
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So I haven't gotten any BSODs since then, but I still get this thing where my PC will freeze for 2-3 minutes, and then this error shows up in the Event Viewer.
ctbinx.png


Why is this happening? My system isn't even set to RAID, it's AHCI. The Optane, that the HDD was originally set to RAID with, was unpaired and completely uninstalled (drivers and physical removal).

I have no idea why I keep getting this error. I've scrubbed my PC of the RAID drivers.

EDIT: Also, when the freeze happened I saw my disk usage in task manager shoot up to 100%.
 
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Apr 6, 2020
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I did all the testing with SeaTools and this time it passed all tests, even the long generic. I also doublechecked with CrystalDiskInfo and Hard Disk Sentinel, both of which showing everything is good.

Memory issue, maybe?
 
Apr 6, 2020
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The drive has recorded about 4 billion seeks (with 0 seek errors). I can't recall ever seeing that many. What sort of workload is the drive subject to?
It's been used as a drive in a network system where it has to run 24/7 but currently it's just being used for storage.
In your Bios, the Sata ports are set to AHCI mode?
Some Raid controllers can pass a drive that uses AHCI while the ports themselves can be in raid mode.
Yes. I have an Asus motherboard and I tried to see if there was any way to actually disable that raidport0 thing in any way, but I couldn't. The system is absolutely 100% set to AHCI though.
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
It only adds unneeded complexity to any issues that arise. For instance, you now have a virtual controller and drive managing the real hardware; so where does the real issue lie? I'm not even sure why your using it since you only have 1 drive. I assume it's from your Optane fix.
 
Apr 6, 2020
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It only adds unneeded complexity to any issues that arise. For instance, you now have a virtual controller and drive managing the real hardware; so where does the real issue lie? I'm not even sure why your using it since you only have 1 drive. I assume it's from your Optane fix.
It automatically installed after the RAID installation was removed. I'm not going to uninstall it as I've seen other people who have gotten rid of storage space controller drivers and completely bricked their HDD.
 
Apr 6, 2020
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Well, today I just had another BSOD but this time it had the stopcode MEMORY MANAGEMENT. Yet again, I had put the PC to sleep mode and it froze while trying to do so, forcing me to shut it off and then back on. After it came back on I got that BSOD, then it rebooted with no issues.

At this point, I'm thinking it MUST be a memory issue, and I'll be doing some memory diagnostics later. In the meantime, I have some dumps/logs from the BSOD so is there anyone that has something that can read those? I'd really like to know what specifically caused it, just to eliminate the chance that my HDD or something else could be at fault still somehow.