Mouse and Audio stutter/freezes with Intel ICH9R AHCI drivers

Question

edit: Initially (in original post) I suspected the random mouse and audio stutter/freezes were from a driver update. However between a reboot during these updates I had disconnected an eSATA cable from a drive that was not powered. It turns out the ICH9R when running in AHCI or RAID mode with appropriate drivers installed has problems with some HDDs when the drive isn't powered but the SATA data cable is connected. This is quite normal in SATA enclosures which I have plenty.
What makes this more puzzling is that the stutter/freezes are very tiny and hard to notice IF you don't have any PCI cards connected. With a Intel 100 Mbit PCI NIC connected these stutters became real blocking issue that would have prompted me to return this Gigabyte G33 motherboard (Also affects P35) to the shop had I noticed this issue sooner. I'm not yet sure whether this stutter w/ AHCI/RAID issue affects only the Gigabyte boards but what is certain is that it does affect these in quantity based on how there's others reporting the exact same issue if googling around.

Answer 1

This issue has been confirmed not to be limited to just my system.
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showpost.aspx?postid=1196678&siteid=1&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=5
 androidi wrote:
Same problem here, it's not limited to Vista, also happens on XP/2003 both 32/64 bit. I'm 99% sure it's to do with the Intel AHCI/Matrix storage driver. It'd be interesting to know what your motherboard brand/model is. Mine is Gigabyte DS2R and I've seen reports of this issue on other forums as well. I'm using the integrated Intel graphics and every component is Intel except Audio Realtek and Network Broadcom. The issue goes away by disabling AHCI/RAID but you lose hot-swap of SATA drives and NCQ.
The primary indicator for this issue is that if any of the SATA ports has a drive that is plugged in but not powered up (and not powered down by the AHCI driver programmatically) then you get this global stutter/studder/hickups/choppy. In audio it sounds like tiny repeats. How bad it is seems to depend on what drive brand is plugged in etc so on some combinations it's very tiny and doesn't happen that often, on other drives it's more constant and easy to detect.
I'd suggest you report at:
http://supportmail.intel.com/scripts-emf/welcome.aspx?id=
Chipsets/Chipset software/Matrix storage Technology
btw. My AHCI BIOS/OROM version that is shown on boot with AHCI/RAID enabled is iSRC 1.07 08042006, what's yours?
 nada_clue wrote:
Though most posts in this thread involve laptops and many of them attempt to isolate the problem in wireless network adapters, let me assure you the same problem can show up in a desktop with wired-ethernet-only. (Admittedly, it's a Realtek onboard gigabit LAN, and Realtek has been fingered by a number of you for its drivers, at least its audio drivers.)
On a brand new core2-quad P35 chipset machine with 4GB ddrII, with a completely clean install of Vista 32 business, I have been suffering intermittent global stuttering. It affects not only audio (of any sort, through any player, whether or not dsp-enhanced) but also video (you can see it in screen saver motion, for instance) and even cursor or mouse movement (hit and hold the spacebar in a text editor and watch the stuttering fun begin!). It's intermittent but not random; that is, it can disappear for a while after I apply one of my stab-in-the-dark fixes (read on) but can come back and then generally remains until I re-apply a fix. It's been like this since about day 1. Well, maybe day 2 or 3.
I've seen so many variants of this problem posted in so many forums, with so many theories, that I could spend the next three months doing nothing but troubleshooting it, assuming I had the budget and time to try endless substitute components or re-builds from scratch, but there's no assurance any or all of that would actually fix it. I do have the Intel Storage Matrix AHCI drivers pre-installed, and Intel itself vaguely alludes to possible 'degraded performance in Vista' with regard to those drivers--is this what they're talking about? They don't say. I do have an Nvidia 8800gts, and Nvidia forums are full of complaints about unacceptable issues with their video drivers, but again it's vague, no smoking gun for global stuttering. I have tried THREE different audio configurations--the onboard realtek hi-def; an x-fi elite; and a c-media based Omega Claro card. I have the problem with all of them. Discovering how musical the c-media card is was a happy accidental side effect of this miserable odyssey, but it really just makes it more frustrating, since I now want to listen to music more than ever but can't find a permanent solution to this vexing problem.
One of the weirdest symptoms is that the stuttering can re-appear (if it has been gone for a few days) just by connecting an external SATA drive, even if the drive is not turned on! Equally weird: simply going into the BIOS and just looking, changing nothing, exiting without saving, can cause it to reappear upon re-boot!
And to ice this cake of weirdness, here are some things that can make it go away (sometimes, at least for a while): removing the external SATA drive and rebooting; removing and re-seating the cards on the motherboard; and clearing the BIOS (jumper or pull out the battery) and then re-entering all the same settings as were there already.
The symptoms are driving me nuts, as audio is one of my main uses for a computer, but it's the HUH? quality of these various actions that can seem to make the problem disappear or re-appear that are really threatening my sanity. If anybody can sift a better clue out of these ashes of frustration than I can, I wish you would post it.