I hope I can get some new ideas to solve the issue. What I have:

• AMD Phenom II X4 905e Box, Sockel AM3
• Gigabyte GA-MA790XTA-UD4, AMD 790X, AM3 ATX
• WD Caviar GreenPower 1,5TB SATA II
• 4GB Kit OCZ DDR3 PC3-10666 Platinum Low-Voltage CL7
• HIS HD 4670 iSilence4 DDR3 1024MB Native HDMI Dual-DVI, PCI-Express

Behavior: Everything works normally excepting the HDD accesses. The drive seems to get stuck in reading data (LED drive by Mainboard is on for a while) then recovers and goes on. There is a delay of more than 30s sometimes. Often it is a matter of 5-10s. This does not seem related to the workload of the disk.

What I tried so far:

• Use different SATA port: I switched from the SATA3 to SATA2 then the SATA driven by the CPU, no difference.
• Turned AHCI off, drove the SATA in IDE mode, same behavior, now I felt like the HDD has problems
• Deactivated energy saving settings (BeQuiet, ...), disabled 3 CPUs (msconfig) supposing some race condition or trouble with changing freqs, same trouble
• With Windows7 Professional 64Bit, I installed the hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B976418&x=8&y=9 with no success. The problem description matches what I experienced, so I felt lucky but was quite in a sad mood after being deceived.
• Burned the DLG 5.04f DataLifeGuard CD from WD to check the drive. All tests passed, to my surprise!
• Installed an Ubuntu on the same drive i386 flavour. Drive still in IDE mode, exactly the same behavior. So the OS does not matter.

What I did not try yet:

• http://www.gigabyte.eu/Support/Motherboard/BIOS_Model.aspx?ProductID=3263 I have a F2 BIOS and there is a F3a Beta, did someone have similar issues that were solved by this update? It is a beta so I fear upgrading a bit and I could find no release notes at all on the net, not really serious work maybe they had issues translating from Chinese???
• Using another HDD drive

Does someone have other hints or a similar issue? Maybe it is neither the HDD nor the Mainboard/BIOS?