My new (2 months) Western Digital WD3200JD SATA drive is starting to fail. I
don't know for sure if it is the drive or the SATA interface on my
motherboard. The boot drive is an ATA drive and continues to work fine. The
SATA is my data drive. After a boot, the SATA drive works fine, but then it
may suddenly disappear! Disk manager shows no drive present. Device manger
says that the SATA interface is working fine. Only a reboot will fix this
situation.

Another computer user I know in town just got a new computer for himself and
installed a SATA drive. He had some lockup problems that he described to me.
It sounded very much like the hard drive interface or hard drive was
failing. He temporarily replaced the drive with his old ATA drive, and all
lockup problems went away.

My question to the list is to find out how prevalent SATA failure may be.
Are the drives prone to failure, or is it the controller on the motherboard
that is the culprit? I suspect the drive, but till I can run further
analysis no conclusion can be made. Please share any feedback on SATA that
you may have.

Thank you,

Peter
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