SATA driver issue w/ Win 7 and Gigabyte GA-MA785G-UD3H  

I'm glad I could help with your boot-time issue. I know how frustrating it is trying to troubleshoot something like that. It appears that Gigabyte has issues with USB devices at boot, there are a number of references to them on various websites

I don't have any SATA opticals, just two PATAs. What is the Microsoft driver that you're using for the WD Black? I'd like to try something other than the AMD. By the way, the Gigabyte site shows a new driver released on 11/5/09, but the drivers contained in the download seem to be the same ones that were previously released - they are dated May of '09.

I have to tell you, I do like this motherboard, but I find it's little pecadillos needlessly frustrating.

I used the "Standard AHCI 1.0 Sata Controller" driver and the drives shut down properly now with AHCI enabled in the BIOS. I guess the AMD driver is not quite there yet.

Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions.

I hav the same problem as well. HDD idle for 15 secs during windows 7 boot screen using windows AHCI drivers

tried AMD drivers but HDD clicks 5 times before power is turned off at shutdown. I think it was the cause of my brand new seagate failing. Had to take it to the shops and get a new one. I recommend sticking with the windows AHCI drivers until AMD fixes these drivers.

I was having the same issue with my Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H and 2 Seagate. I also have removed the AMD HDD driver and it worked for me as well. Thanks Guys...

Same problem on GA-MA790GP-DS4H with the AMD AHCI driver on Win7 Pro x64.

The problem here (I think) is as jnorris said at the start of the thread "It sounds like the hard drives spin speed is slowing down then speeding up again."

When you cold boot the hard drives spin up as soon as the power supply turns on, and they are all running by the time the AHCI BIOS starts looking for them.

When you restart, for some reason AMD's AHCI driver tells the hard drives to spin down (why???). When the AHCI BIOS starts up, it tells the hard drives to spin up but it uses staggered spin-up. By the time (in my case) your third hard drive gets the command to spin up, the AHCI BIOS is tired of waiting and throws a SMART error for "spin up time too long" (or whatever it is).

Like everyone else in the thread, switched back to the MS driver. Thanks guys!

I happened to have the exact same problem too, and came upon this thread while googling for solutions.

I have a GA-MA790FXT-UD5P with 6 HDDs connected, 4 in hot-swap bays, to the AMD SB750 chipset SATA ports using AHCI mode. I installed Windows 7 with the AMD AHCI drivers, and as everyone else here, from a cold boot, the AMD AHCI bios detects the drives fine, but when rebooting Windows 7 the AMD AHCI driver spins the drives down, and they don't spin up again until the AHCI BIOS tries to detect the drives, upon which they all get a S.M.A.R.T. failure (from spinning up too late, I assume).

I'm not sure this has any negative effect, though if this failure is reported in the drives S.M.A.R.T. constantly, perhaps it adds to a value that in turn will end up giving a permanent S.M.A.R.T. failure because it has happened too many times.

As previous poster, what I don't get is, why do the AMD AHCI driver spin the drives down when doing a reboot? Or when shutting down Windows 7 for that matter (when the computer finally powers off, the drives do too anyway)? The only reason I can see the need for the drives to spin down, is when you select to eject them for hot-swapping (the AMD AHCI driver does this). That's the only need for the drives to be powered off while the computer is still running.

Thanks to this thread, I solved the problem too, by using the standard Microsoft AHCI driver. However, the standard Microsoft AHCI driver does not power the drives off if you select to eject them (so you might want to wait till the drive has spun down before you remove it from the bay proper), and what's also a slight annoyance, the Microsoft AHCI driver does not spin up and autodetect drives when you hot-swap them. You'll have to scan for hardware changes for a new drive to turn up. Atleast the AMD AHCI driver did that automatically.

I to had the same problem but with the microsoft sata driver the boot time is very slow. So i tried to download the 9.12 ahci driver from ati homepage, you can not install the driver through the installer itself and on the ati homepage they say it is only recommended to use that driver if you use a retail amd motherboard only.
Still all the drivers comes from amd and the only thing i think that gigabyte or other vendors do is to try the driver and see that it really works with the product before they release it. So i thought that i would do my own testings so i extracted the installation files to my desktop and then installed it manually through the device manager and voila! now i have the newest driver for the ahci and the problem is fixed. I have had no problem at all with this driver so i recommend you guys to do the same, and win7 boots up fast . Download the ahci driver here: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?driver=Integrated/vista32-chipset and extract it to the desktop or wherever you want. Enter the devicemanager and open up the ide ata atapi controllers and there you choose the sata controller and choose to update driver and link it to the place where you have extracted the 9.12 ahci directory. In my case= C:\Users\Tony\Desktop\9-12_vista32-64_ahci\Packages\Drivers\SBDrv\SB7xx\AHCI\LH64A and there you have the amdsata.inf driver so just install and reboot the computer and then you are done. Probably you guys already know how to do this but i just wanted to help them who didn't, and please excuse my english im a swedish dude and my english is getting kind of rusty. Best Regards //Tony

sonyb said:

I to had the same problem but with the microsoft sata driver the boot time is very slow. So i tried to download the 9.12 ahci driver from ati homepage, you can not install the driver through the installer itself and on the ati homepage they say it is only recommended to use that driver if you use a retail amd motherboard only.
Still all the drivers comes from amd and the only thing i think that gigabyte or other vendors do is to try the driver and see that it really works with the product before they release it. So i thought that i would do my own testings so i extracted the installation files to my desktop and then installed it manually through the device manager and voila! now i have the newest driver for the ahci and the problem is fixed. I have had no problem at all with this driver so i recommend you guys to do the same, and win7 boots up fast . Download the ahci driver here: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?driver=Integrated/vista32-chipset and extract it to the desktop or wherever you want. Enter the devicemanager and open up the ide ata atapi controllers and there you choose the sata controller and choose to update driver and link it to the place where you have extracted the 9.12 ahci directory. In my case= C:\Users\Tony\Desktop\9-12_vista32-64_ahci\Packages\Drivers\SBDrv\SB7xx\AHCI\LH64A and there you have the amdsata.inf driver so just install and reboot the computer and then you are done. Probably you guys already know how to do this but i just wanted to help them who didn't, and please excuse my english im a swedish dude and my english is getting kind of rusty. Best Regards //Tony

That would work but I'm using the built in AMD driver and it loads perfectly, roughly 3 or 4 seconds to initialize and load. Its an Gigabyte MA 790GPT-UD3H.

Credit to Sonyb! I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H. I did an installation of the AMD AHCI installer that I downloaded from AMD website. I verified that it was installed successfully (device manager) BUT I was still getting the S.M.A.R.T. error message. So I did what Sonyb suggested, which was to install the driver via device manager (update driver option) and it booted without any glitch. Thanks!