I have had a system built around the A8N-SLI Premium for over a year with none of the extreme problems people seemed to encountered. A week ago I added a fourth sata drive ( Maxtor DiamondMax 21 ), which filled all my nvsata ports. Ever since then if I have to much HD activity such as watch a video of the Maxtor and play a game on my other monitor my systems video will freeze but the audio will continue for about 45 seconds.

Now I have run every -*test*-('") I can think of on the HD, it is a good HD. My question is then... is there an issue with filling all the nvsata ports? I am running XP Pro.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I run four Raptors on my NV ports with no problems, so I don't think you're stretching the capacity of the board at all. I think it more likely that the DiamondMax 21 with it's native SATA 3 is causing you some issues when combined with Sata 1.5 drives. Try jumpering the drive down to SATA 1.5 and see if that solves your problem. It will not cause you any performance issues, as no hard drive is anywhere close to being able to deliver the 1.5 Gb/s rating of SATA 1.5.

Thank you for your help. Unfortunately that was the first thing I did when it messed up, and it has not solved the issue. I have read that Maxtor HDs have issues with this board but my HD isn't listed anywhere that I have seen as one of the ones with problems. Any other advice would be most welcome.

I am not aware of any issues with the 21 series drives. However, they are relatively new at this point and not much is known about them.

Can you try this for me? Unplug the sata cable from the 21, but leave it powered. See if you can recreate the problem in that configuration.