730 messes with Creative sound card driver

[ppara5]

This system is a i5-2500k, DZ68BC (BIOS 28), Creative sound card, and 730 240 GB desktop. The PSU is 650 W Seasonic gold and the RAM is Crucial Ballistix Tactical 1333. Up until recently I had a WDC hard drive instead of the 730. After reinstalling W-7 on the 730, I noticed that every time the system went to sleep and woke up, the sound was crackly and distorted. A reboot always fixes things. Then I took an old WDC hard drive and installed W-7 for a few hours (the 730 was disconnected) as a test and there was no sound problem. Therefore the 730 is the cause. Yes, the onboard audio is disabled.

My questions are:

- Is the 730 series intended for use as Windows system drives?

- The Microsoft device driver is 6.1.7600.16385. Does Intel have a newer, better one?

- I seem to remember reading that the 730 has different sleep characteristics and that the drive isn't recommended for laptops for that reason (excessive heat is another problem). If this is true, is it possible to change its sleeping habits to that of a 530?

[ppara5]

It took me a while to get back to this, but I uninstalled the Marvell SATA driver that I had installed from the cdrom and installed the latest from Intel's website. The crackly sound is gone. I would never have guessed that a SATA driver would affect a sound card driver.

[jbenavides]

Hello Paramountain,

I am glad to know that you have found the cause of this problem. This will be very helpful for other users facing this type of situation.