I've come across a problem after building my new PC and installing a clean Windows 7. I originally planed on a RAID 1 or 0 but after further research I decided against it.

So I was left with two 1TB Western Digital Black SATA 6Gb/s hard drives. My plan now was to use my second hard drive as a backup (using Windows Backup or 3rd party software). I set both hard drives to AHCI in the BIOS and installed Windows 7. I went through the lengthy process of downloading and installing each driver manually (latest versions), using the motherboard disk for a list of what I need. After a few restarts and before installing any software, I took an image backup onto DVD and the second hard drive.

First witnessed the problem during the first scheduled Windows backup. The progress bar froze at about 70% (doc backup done, image backup in progress). It stayed still for 2 hours until it blue screened. Next time the backup froze, I tried shutting down. It logged me out and got stuck at the last step ("Shutting down" and blue spinner) for an hour, until I hard shutdown.

I later realised this hasn't got anything to do with the backup. I ended up blue screening on almost every shut down (same place). Turns out, it's because of the second hard drive spinning down or turning off. The computer will now shutdown properly, as long as I remember to read or write to the second drive before executing shutdown.

I've now set "Turn off hard disk after: Never" - No problems, so far.

Do I have dodgy hard drive(s) or should I investigate the POWER_STATE_DRIVER_FAILURE BSOD - can it be a driver issue? AHCI?