Fred Leggett

I'll investigate the port multiplier route, but I wanted to limit the amount of raw cards in my system, hence my attraction to the Areca and similar options. I'm conducting an experiment. Instead of invoking the Scanner interface when the semi-freeze occurs, I'm letting it run all the time. It's been running like that for the past two days and I haven't experienced any freezes. If I make it to the 10-day mark, I'm going to assume Scanner is somehow defeating or bypassing the problem. If it gets there, do you have any ideas what could be happening?

Hmmm. Someone wrote a pretty meh review of that Avago card you linked. I really wish these cards would drop in price some. I would happily pay around $500 for a brand-name model with six 8643 connectors, but $1k is just out of my price range. I don't like going the used route, but I'm beginning to think it might be the only way to replace my current Marvell pair with something less sketchy. That system freeze memory dump procedure looks like it would generate some extremely interesting results. Thanks for the link. If the Intel RST drivers are the culprit, that would be invaluable to know. However, if it turns out to be Marvell driver related, I'm really screwed.

I've had those Marvell cards for awhile now. At the time, they were pretty popular, as they were a VERY cheap way to obtain SAS connectivity and increase raw port count without needing a multiplier. I'm using two inside a Norco 4224 case alongside my motherboard's SATA headers. They run EXTREMELY hot, so I'm thinking of replacing the heatsinks with an active cooling solution. My dream was to one day obtain one of these monsters: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151173 but I never was in a financial position to buy one. Well, I guess I'll remove the RST drivers to see if that solves the problem. The thing is I can't trip these semi-freezes manually, so I might never know if that was the issue.

My apologies for not getting back to this. No good reason why, just the days are whizzing by. I actually do have the Intel RST drivers installed. The latest ones I could find at the time (15.9.4.1041). I'm also using a pair of Supermicro/Marvell SAS controllers that have long been superseded by more advanced controllers. I could just use the packaged Windows 10 drivers, but I absolutely have to use the Marvell ones. Have you heard of any problems with Supermicro cards? The product page is https://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SASLP-MV8.cfm

I'm beginning to suspect the CPU. I'm using the onboard graphics of my i5-4960K, which contains Intel HD graphics 4600. I don't really know why the CPU would be the culprit, though, as it seems to work fine in all other respects. And, as I wrote earlier, the temps are all fine, so it can't be an overheating issue. Drivers are all up-to-date. Windows is fully updated. The BIOS is the latest. Very strange. I guess I'm gonna have to do additional troubleshooting.

This doesn't really have anything to do with Scanner, but it IS related, so please keep reading. Every once in awhile, my Windows 10 system will partially freeze. By partially, I mean I can still access the start menu and run certain programs, but the rest of the system is unresponsive. Bizarrely, this seems to happen only when I'm watching YouTube videos. I think it might've also happened once when I was running a video through MPC-HC. I also witness the occasional BSOD caused by a core video driver, which might be related and is distressing, but can't be heat-related (see below). For a few weeks now, Scanner has been reporting that my NVMe (a Samsung 950 Pro) is running seriously hot. I finally had enough of that and bought an active SSD cooler. Once installed, temps dropped considerably. Scanner still reports a warning, but only a degree above spec instead of the almost 10 degrees at which it was running before. Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped the partial freeze issue. I've checked my CPU temps and they're all nominal. In fact, they're all exceedingly low, as I only use this box for HTPC duties and use a Corsair AIO. This is where Scanner starts to really enter the picture. When the partial freeze occurs, I can invoke Scanner and it will unfreeze the freeze. I originally thought Scanner might be the problem, but the freezes persisted even after uninstall. So, as it turns out, Scanner is actually the one program I can rely on to restore my system to a usable state. My question is this - what is Scanner doing to unstick my system? Is it sending some sort of wake or initialization command to my drives when invoked? If I can understand this better, I might have a shot at determining the real culprit. While I'm not running the most complex of setups, I would rather avoid having to reinstall Windows and everything else if I can help it. Plus, there's no guarantee that will fix the problem. Thanks in advance.