So this has plagued me for quite some time. I'm inclined to say years. I do remember such a point that it wasnt an issue, but iirc it was IRST ~15.xx and prior.
I'm unsure what changed but post that point, all IRST drivers have caused my system to temporarily freeze any time a hard drive wakes from sleep.
I know, the easy out is to disable sleep. Unfortunately I run 11 hard disks and many arent accessed often, so between heat, energy, longevity.. preference, you get the idea.

If a drive spins up, the entire pc is unuseable until its done. If im gaming - freeze. if im working, cant even move the mouse or carry on while i wait for it to finish spinning up.
this does not happen with the standard ahci driver from microsoft. Also doesnt happen with the irst(e) drivers which i not only find odd, but arent for my board anyhow.

Does anyone know what changed in relatively recent history that caused this to happen, or if theres a means to eliminate the hang without resorting to disabling drive sleep or reverting to the generic driver?
Loooooooooooooong time lurker and this finally forced a registration so i can let the pro's at it :P

Hello, i'll provide what information I can.

OS - Windows 10 Pro
Motherboard - Asus maximus x formula (z370 chipset)
Driver versions that caused freezing are literally anything for almost the past year. all 17.x for certain. Have been "re-trying" them semi regularly to see if the issue has been resolved.

I prefer to not use the generic driver for entirely arbitrary reasons tbh. I know the performance difference (if any) is likely within margin of error. I'd just prefer to have hardware which has an associated driver paired with such.
hence my reason for using the irste even though its only supposed to be for XSeries boards and places my sata chipset under Storage Controllers instead of IDE/ATAPI controllers in device manager (like irst & generic do).
it at least avoids the entire system halt whenever a spun down drive is accessed.

The issue is sprinkled all over google but everyone's go-to solution is always to set drives to never sleep. With 11 hard disks, thats just not reasonable.
Trying to find a middle ground or if theres anything else i can do. You guys are the professionals in that(this) arena so i figured if i cant find a way around it here, it is what it is.

I'd be inclined to agree except for
a) the problem wasnt present with ANY much older irst driver, any irste driver, or the generic microsoft driver
b) the exact issue is referenced elsewhere on the net
c) I use a 1500w evga psu (oddly enough, the issue doesnt present when im opening something like the recyling bin, or macirum which spins up all of them at once, only if i try to access a single sleeping drive via windows explorer)

1) i replace the drivers 9/10 times via right clicking the inf > install. or at times via device manager > update driver > specify location > navigate to driver folder.

2) as far as the irst(e) drivers go, ive been using those since the 5 series up until current. In all honesty i didnt realize they were limited to the x series boards until after i had already begun using them. It was surprising since they A) install fine and B) circumvented that doozy of an issue for me lol.

I'm using the 6.2.2.1006 as we speak having just upgraded from the prior release a few weeks back.

as i mentioned, i revisit this every once in awhile in an attempt to see if its worked itself out as id definitely prefer to be using drivers that are indicated as being for my board and identify as such in device manager.

I appreciate youre being thorough :)

Zitat von Fernando im Beitrag #6

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@klepp0906:
How old are your 11 HDDs and how heavy have they been used in the past?

Zitat von klepp0906 im Beitrag #5

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a) the problem wasnt present with ANY much older irst driver, any irste driver, or the generic microsoft driver

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If so, why didn't you stick to the "old" ones? Newer drivers are not automaticly better.

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very sound advice, and thank you for the suggested driver. Sounds like my next stop. Will let ya know how it goes.

thanks again, appreciate it!

Hi, a year ago I posted here
New intel build, odd behaviour
for the very same problem.
At a certain point an EFI driver update for my board (Asus Prime Z370-A) was released and the problem disappeared.

After many windows updates and a couple of new Intel IRST drivers, the problem reappeared and the only way to solve it for me was to disable sleep on the drive I use for backups.
My other two drives are in a RAID0 array, and keeping sleep active on the spare drive would freeze the system anytime the spare disk had to be accessed or read (even when opening task manager).

I'm very interested in klepp0906 findings.

I cannot remember which combo of EFI driver + IRST driver would get rid of this annoying problem, but I suspect that the many windows updates of the last year could play a part in this, so I've pretty much given up on finding a solution.
Fortunately disabling sleep on my only backup drive is no big deal, but I'm absolutely positive that a couple of years ago, on my previous setup, this problem didn't exist whatsoever.

@Lurk:
well i installed Fernando's driver, and the problem did disappear. (as i noted, it was not present in old irst drivers)
unfortunately i also began having a problem with my drives never sleeping so until i solve that i cant dive more into this. Now im presented with a problem where windows has changed my device enumeration around and my OS drive is number 7. The struggle :P
imagine having to scroll down 7 drives to deal with backing up your system drive in macrium #sigh
anyhow, thats another topic.

Back to the point, this problem more than anything has driven me towards disabling sleep on my drives. However I run 12 drives and the heat + power draw and extra wear just doesnt seem worth it. The alternative seems to be using the wrong driver for my platform, or a 5 year old driver which im fortunate enough has been modified to be usable :)

Still on a mission to try and find the best solution overall At this point as i mentioned, its either fernando's drivers or using IRSTE drivers, which while not meant for the z370 chipset, are different enough that they dont cause the issue.

for some reason using generic microsoft drivers doesnt sit well. Same as refusing to use generic NVME drivers. (those actually have pretty large benchmarked performance ramifications).

EDIT by Fernando: Unneeded fully quoted post and blank lines removed (to save space and for better readability)

wonder if it has anything to do with this
https://blogs.visigo.com/chriscoulson/ssd-freezing-fix/

i doubt it, at least not directly due to age of the post. Still it does revolve around the handling of coming out of a lower power state.

those exact keys dont exist, at least not on my build. but several related do nearby. Unfortunately it quickly goes above my pay grade so to speak.

found something interesting. Drivers such as the 13.x.x variant that doesnt present the issue - iaStorA, see here HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorA\Parameters\Device

now drivers such as the new IRST which DO present the hanging - iaStorAC, see here HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorAC\Parameters\Device

See all the strings referencing HIPM and DIPM? I'm gonna venture the problem lay there. Not sure what those keys do yet, but i think they override or ignore the OS power management settings or something. Gonna dig more.

edit: just swapped over to irste (which dont have the issue) to test the theory. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorE\Parameters\Device and look what its missing?

all the

Controller0Phy0DIPM
Controller0Phy0HIPM

strings that are present in the new IRST drivers. I'd venture its some kind of funny business going on with HIPM/DIPM. Windows 10 (at least on desktops) appears to default to HIPM (at least on the balanced power plan). I'm going to try to set it to active and see what happens.

if it works, then your options are probably setting AHCI Link power management to Active, using a driver without those dword values (or altering/deleting them).

will take a bit to see.

and thats a fail. deleted all those dwords to match the others, and still does it. looks like im rollin back again. oh well. about to toss in the towel on that travesty. been dealing with this too long to spend too much more time on it.