Old Intel/Mobo SATA issues

daldaren · January 28, 2014

I have an old Pentium D 925 and recently got an RC415HM-ST OEM board for free from someone I know.. so I was thinking of building a little server box with it. However I have a problem I haven't encountered before: When it's all up and running, 2GB DDR2, ALL DRIVERS installed/updated... it runs extremely slow.. XP 32 bit or Windows 7 32bit.

The problem appears to be the SATA support.. It's running AHCI, detects everything fine, but gives random issues from time to time. The Hard Drive is one I have used recently and it's in perfect condition/no errors. I know it's not the drive, as it works perfect in any other rig I toss it in. The biggest issue I'm seeing is looooooong access times, Loooooooooooooooooooong boot times, and occasional mini-freezes. No BSOD so far. It is running in UDMA, not PIO, which was my first assumption but... Yeah..

Any ideas what the issue could be? Would it be a good idea to try a PCI SATA controller? I don't have one free but there are some cheaper ones I could get, but I'd rather avoid expenses on a 'refurb server'. Alternatively, I don't 'trust' the OEM Mobo, so if anyone knows a still-accessible / cheap replacement board for this particular CPU, that would be a fine thing to suggest!