H87-D3H issues with SATAII

[jeffman19]

I'm having an issue on my GA-H87-D3H motherboard where all of the drives I try will randomly disappear. Sometimes they appear in BIOS, sometimes they don't. I've tried three different power supplies, four different drives, with and without my GTX 770 installed, different SATA cables, different SATA ports, and memtest passed overnight with no errors. All of the drives worked fine in a previous system and they all work fine using an enclosure.

Today I exchanged the motherboard at the retailer for a new one of the same model, and the same problems occur. I opened a ticket with Gigabyte on Wednesday but with no response so far.

At this point the only possible issue is that my drives, which are all SATA II, simply do not play well with Haswell. This is disappointing since SATA III is supposed to be backwards-compatible and these drives are only a couple years old. My drives are: OCZ Vertex 2 120GB, 2 x WD 1TB, 1 x WD 320GB, all with the same issue.

I looked through the beta BIOS thread, I found plenty of solutions for Z87 users with this issue but I found nothing for H87. Would anyone be able to help me with this issue? Can I use the Z87 BIOS on this board or would that be a bad idea?

[wazza300]

Re: H87-D3H issues with SATAII

what ports do you have on that board some are sata3 speed right? and what are the others? some might be intel and some might be third party like asmedia ect

there are known issues with older sandforce controlled ssd's on z87/h87 chipsets atm,stability and drive disappearing,the mechanical hdd's should be unaffected

for your ocz ssd I would try it on a non intel sata port if you have any

don't use z87 bios,your board is different,flash to latest h87-d3h on gigabytes website if you havn't already

[jeffman19]

Re: H87-D3H issues with SATAII

Unfortunately the manual doesn't mention if some ports have different controllers, I know what you're talking about though, I've seen some motherboards that do that.

I managed to work around the issue by setting the drives to IDE mode instead of SATA mode. I haven't had any problems so far in IDE mode.

[parsec]

Re: H87-D3H issues with SATAII

Your H87-D3H just has the Intel SATA controller. All the SATA ports are SATA III, which are compatible with SATA II drives.

The Vertex 2 is not compatible with Haswell boards, or really is not compatible with the tightened up SATA specs that these boards and drivers now support. It's a shame people blame Haswell chipsets when the problem is the lousy firmware of the Sandforce 1200 controller. I use three different SSDs (including Sandforce 2281 controller SSDs) in my Z87 board (not a Gigabyte) and I have zero detection issues using RAID mode.

So your Vertex 2 is working for you in IDE mode? If so, great, but a shame you must sacrifice AHCI features for it.

What SATA driver are you using? If you are using the IRST driver, there is a "Hotfix" of some kind on your board's download page for use with the IRST driver. That seems unique to Gigabyte boards...

Don't know what OS you are using.

[jeffman19]

Re: H87-D3H issues with SATAII

I spoke too soon -- the issues have started up again, even on IDE mode. I don't know how to check what SATA driver I'm using. My OS is Windows 8.1, but the issues occur before I even boot to Windows.

At this point, might it help if I grabbed a SATA II PCIe controller card? With all these problems, I think I'm due to buy some SATA III drives on Boxing Day, but it would be a shame for all of my SATA II drives to go to waste.

[parsec]

Re: H87-D3H issues with SATAII

Besides the Vertex II, which is simply not compatible with a Haswell chipset board, your problem is not the SATA II drives.

The PCI-E card is basically not a bad idea to bypass the onboard SATA interface, but not all mother boards will boot from a PCI-E card. Actually, most won't.

To check your storage driver, open Device Manager, and check for either an entry for "ATA/IDE...", or "Storage Controllers". Open either entry, double click the device, and then click on the Driver tab, which will show what driver you are using.