Hi egavin,
This is an interesting issue, because I do not see any way that an SATA hard drive could cause the program to hang. If you are using the same computer and program, and simply switching hard drives, and seeing the program hang, then perhaps the hard drive is corrupted somehow. Do you have another SATA hard drive to try?
Another thing to try is to create a program that does some simple GPIB communication calling the NI driver. This will help isolate the issue from the rest of the software. If the issue still occurs with this simple program and with two different SATA hard drives, then we will need to look deeper into this issue.
-John M