Event ID 129, iaStorA “Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0": could software cause this ?

I don’t know what to do next with creeping Event ID 129, iaStorA “Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.” on my Precision M4700 running Win7/64 SP1.

I don’t know exactly when it started (but at least 2 months ago, the approx. size of my Windows System log), but lately I noticed unexpected system freezes; since they mostly (if not always) happen when I launch or use a particular, demanding application, I first thought it was a software problem.

But eventually I had the idea to look at the Windows logs, and noticed a relatively large number of Event ID 129, iaStorA “Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.” which, as I understand it, is a symptom of a low-level hardware issue with the (system) disk or controller. And I then noticed that these Events appeared right after the system “freezes”, which can be as soft as that app freezing (and then, one of the CPU cores is maxed out for process “System Interrupts – Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupt Service Routines”: as soon as this process drops its CPU usage back to normal, the app “unfreezes” and finishes to load/work) or as hard as the system becoming severely unresponsive, with mouse and cursor locked etc.

I ran the Dell diagnostics on this system, and neither the disk nor the other hardware components reported issues there. Digging deeper, I eventually noticed an “abnormal” number of ECC errors for the offending disk SMART test. So I went ahead and swapped the disk with a brand new one, and successfully cloned the partitions to this new disk.

But the problems are still there….

I have the latest DELL drivers for this system, including the Intel RST driver+app, and “Link State Power Management” is disabled both in Windows power settings (for PCI Express) as well as in Intel RST (I read somewhere that the latter supersedes the setting in Windows Power Options).

So I’m puzzled: before I go ahead and reinstall my system from scratch, I would like to be sure there is a significant chance that the problem root cause could be software-related (and could disappear with a fresh OS installation); if not, which is likely since Event ID 129 is supposed to be hardware related, reinstalling my system from scratch would be wasted time, right ? And if hardware-related, why is the problem appearing exclusively with one app (this is not 100% sure however) ? And finally, with a brand new hard disk and diagnostics returning “pass” everywhere, where should I go now ????

Recap of symptoms:

1)      (Apparently random) system “freezes” (1 or more minutes long); mostly if not exclusively when launching or working with a specific application.

2)      When system state allows, I observe “System Interrupts – Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupt Service Routines” consuming about 10% of total CPU (one of 8 logical cores near 100%) during that “freeze” state.

3)      Event ID 129 logged after that.