My motherboard was causing HDD errors. Why?

[Valnar]

My home server has an ASUS Q470M-C motherboard. I have five HDD's for media storage and an NVMe for boot. I use 5 of the 6 SATA ports on the motherboard for the hard drives.

I started getting random disk errors in the event log and occasionally an entire drive would disappear (causing other problems with apps). A reboot or two later, it would be fine again, but the errors persisted.

My first thought was the onboard SATA ports were having gremlins, so not wanting to change out the the motherboard, I bought a PCIe to SATA card and moved all my HDD's to that instead. I disabled the SATA ports in the BIOS. After some time, the same problems started happening! I've been building PC's for decades and I've never seen anything like that. I'm sure all my hard drives are fine.

In a hail Mary effort to fix this, I bought the same motherboard again (used) off eBay. I replaced the motherboard, moved the SATA cables back to the motherboard, and booted it up. So far, NO ERRORS. Everything is peachy.

Does anyone know why my original motherboard would behave in that manner with a PCIE SATA board? I can understand why the onboard SATA controller might go bad, but I've never seen that behavior move to a different card. My old Q470M-C motherboard is just a couple months out of warranty (of course), so while I'd love to get an official answer from ASUS as to the root cause, I don't want to pay for it.

 

[LigTasm]

Something attached to the Chipset/PCI Express bus was taking a fat dump probably. Did you put the add in card on the top X16 slot straight to the CPU?

 

[Valnar]

Something attached to the Chipset/PCI Express bus was taking a fat dump probably. Did you put the add in card on the top X16 slot straight to the CPU?

Yes I did. However it happened without that card too, for a couple months until I finally replaced the mobo. Definitely weird.

 

[pendragon1]

same cables the whole time?

 

[Valnar]

Yep, same SATA cables, OS NVMe, HDD's, memory, CPU, PSU, all stayed the same.
1) Mobo #1 - HDD errors galore in Event viewer
2) Mobo #1 with new PCIe SATA board. Same HDD errors
3) Mobo #2 - Problem resolved

 

[sram]

At least you fixed the problem. Weird PC issues happen all the time. Did you try the disks with the card in the new board? Maybe the card you bought is also bad.

 

[Valnar]

At least you fixed the problem. Weird PC issues happen all the time. Did you try the disks with the card in the new board? Maybe the card you bought is also bad

I didn't try it. Happy it works now.

 

[chameleoneel]

I feel for you. I once had a DFI brand motherboard, which was corrupting data over the IDE controllers. I could mitigate it by turning down their speed. But, then the system was really slow. And the occasional error would still get through.