heh, seems it's already kicking the bucket

[zCypher]

I got a 60GB Vertex2 for my bday in April, it was fine till recently started to freeze more and more frequently. I noticed that I could still move the mouse around but nothing would respond. The hard drive light was stuck on during those times. The most recent instance, I loaded up CSS (which is stored on a WD Black), everything playing fine. I alt tabbed to check something else and realized Windows was completely frozen and couldn't get back to the game.

I popped the Windows cd in and rebooted. Could not even get past the "loading files" black screen with progress indicator at the bottom, gives an error message that it can't access the HD.

One of the times I rebooted, it did not detect the SSD. Had to turn it off completely and then it would boot up. It used to run fine after rebooting for a while, but now I can't run the system for more than a couple minutes before it completely freezes.

If I go in the BIOS and switch it to boot from WD Black, everything works perfectly (but feels so damn slow in comparison!).

Oh well heh... anything obvious I'm missing or this is pretty much need to RMA? It's a 60GB drive with a bit over 26GB free space.

 

[Eug]

OCZ SF strikes again.

Any drive firmware update or BIOS update available?

 

[HendrixFan]

Do you ever let garbage collection run? With the drive 2/3rds full you may be running into blocks being "moved" around with swap files and the like.

 

[Binky]

See if you can find a destructive flash for that model before doing an RMA. You can get the RMA going now and just cancel it later if the flash revives the drive.

The 1st gen Sandforce drives seem to get a lot of complaints.

 

[zCypher]

Don't know about the firmware/BIOS update, will have to check that - thanks. How do I let garbage collection run? Don't really know anything about that. What is this destructive flash you're talking about Binky?

I was extremely pleased with mine up till now. lol

 

[zCypher]

I don't see any relevant BIOS revisions on the MSI website, so I'm a little hesitant to flash the BIOS unless there's a degree of certainty it might help. I found this firmware from OCZ http://www.ocztechnology.com/ssd_tools/OCZ_Vertex_2,_Vertex_LE,_Agility_2/, guess it's worth trying.

 

[Coup27]

The 1st gen Sandforce drives seem to get a lot of complaints.

You don't need the first 3 words there

 

[zCypher]

Tried secure erase in the OCZ tools, it said "cannot secure erase, drive is frozen" LOL
Tried download firmware, it actually said complete, rebooted, firmware version still says 1.32 instead of 1.33. Tried secure erase again, nothing happened, no error though until a while later when it said diag unlock failed. My computer shows a drive letter for it, but no gb/free numbers. After seeing that error, went back and there's no more drive letter for the ssd. heh tried download firmware again, this time "open drive failed".

 

[Binky]

The OCZ forums can be very helpful.

 

[zCypher]

Checked OCZ forums, didn't find anything helpful.
Submitted RMA with OCZ.

 

[john3850]

I read at two different forms that a 60 gig ssd needs 20gigs of free space
for good performance.

 

[groberts101]

disconnect the drive from power and let it drain residual energy
clear the CMOS
retry detection

can also try it on another machine to see if it gets detected.

secure erase needs to be done with the drive as secondary and the bios of most boards will freeze the drive from having the SE command sent(wouldn't want a tricky virus issueing that command, right? All that needs to be done to unfreeze the drive is to hotplug the drive after you're booted to another OS drive and it will SE. Same with the firmware flash as well.

If you don't have or want to install another OS volume to work from then just use the Linux tool from OCZ to avoid that reinstallation since you simply boot from a USB stick and the SSD becomes a secondary drive. Then you can SE or update as you need to.

There is no destructive flash tool available for any Sandforce drive. That's only applicable to Indilinx controlled drives.

Garbage collection needs 2 things to run. Constant power supply and low activity.

Both are most easily achieved by setting all W7 power option's sleep modes to disabled(or setting the bios sleep mode to S1 since power will remain whereas S3 will cut power to the drive/unless sleep is shut off temporarily as above) and then simply logging out of Windows(since many background activities are shut down during logoff's. Good luck

PS. searching the OCZ forums can be time consuming and frustrating but there are many knowledgable and helpful folks who know this stuff as second nature by now.

Starting a thread and just asking for advice is often fairly quick and easy to do rather than running them by other's without firsthand/similar experience. Nothing against these guys.. but getting it straight from the mfgr/horse's mouth is often more precise without losses in translation. Good luck with it

 

[zCypher]

Thanks for the helpful post groberts101. The first time I ran the secure erase it did say frozen, and it was running as a secondary drive not boot drive. I do have more than 20GB free on the drive (23GB I believe). The second time I tried secure erase it said unlock failed.

The drive has been sitting unplugged for over 24 hours now. I'll try seeing if I can plug it in and attempt secure erase again, though at this point I'm not confident I can trust the drive at all.

In my Win7 power settings not sure if turn drive off after X minutes was enabled, if I can boot off the Vertex2 again I'll check.

When you say hotplug, you mean plug in the Vertex2 while the computer is up and running from another HD?

 

[zCypher]

This is strange, I hooked up the SSD
Went into the BIOS, ACPI is on S1 - there's really no option anywhere for AHCI.
Set my WD Black as boot drive and booted up.
For some reason it booted up from the SSD.
Checked the power settings, HD was set to sleep after 20 mins but hibernation and all of that was disabled. Disabled HD sleep feature anyway.

 

[groberts101]

what mobo is it running off of?

also worth a mention that if HDD's are connected during OS install to the SSD?.. the boot files can be put onto the HDD and cause booting issues as well(though will not affect the drive detection as you were having problems with. You probably know that already but was worth an FYI anyways.

 

[Cerb]

This is strange, I hooked up the SSD
Went into the BIOS, ACPI is on S1 - there's really no option anywhere for AHCI.

SATA modes will be under integrated peripherals, in most BIOSes

 

[zCypher]

what mobo is it running off of?

also worth a mention that if HDD's are connected during OS install to the SSD?.. the boot files can be put onto the HDD and cause booting issues as well(though will not affect the drive detection as you were having problems with. You probably know that already but was worth an FYI anyways.

MSI G31M3-L V2
I'm pretty sure I had only the SSD plugged in when I installed Windows on it. I had a good install set up on my other HDD, definitely did not want to mess that one up (which I'm using now!).

I checked all the menus in the BIOS and did not find any AHCI options, is it possible my motherboard does not support that?

 

[groberts101]

with the age of that board and running the ICH7 chipset.. I highly doubt you will have the AHCI option. Many of the older boards actually only had IDE or RAID modes with the RAID mode being the only way to get single drives running in AHCI mode. I can't see that your board has the RAID option so I would guess no AHCI support.

And with the age of the hardware being used that brings up another question. Is this XP or W7?

If XP(and I assume that it is).. you are properly aligned, right? Can use AS SSD to see the alignment specs real quick if you don't want to fool with diskpar/t. Don't need to run the benchmark.. just open it and paste a screen here if you can detect the drive as secondary.

 

[Cerb]

According to the G31M V 2.x manual, you need to go to:
Integrated Peripherals -> On-Chip ATA Devices, then the options that you have are for the field 'On-Chip SATA Controller'.

Not being an R, you are probably SOL on AHCI, but they definitely have NCQ, and at least some SSDs seem to rely on NCQ for best performance (for that matter, so do the latest mechanical drives).

That said, I don't think any of that will solve your wake-up problem.

 

[zCypher]

with the age of that board and running the ICH7 chipset.. I highly doubt you will have the AHCI option. Many of the older boards actually only had IDE or RAID modes with the RAID mode being the only way to get single drives running in AHCI mode. I can't see that your board has the RAID option so I would guess no AHCI support.

And with the age of the hardware being used that brings up another question. Is this XP or W7?

If XP(and I assume that it is).. you are properly aligned, right? Can use AS SSD to see the alignment specs real quick if you don't want to fool with diskpar/t. Don't need to run the benchmark.. just open it and paste a screen here if you can detect the drive as secondary.

It's not that old, lol. It's just a budget system I built a bit over 2 years ago. I paid about $40 for the motherboard, and about $70 for the CPU. I think the RAM ran me about $70 (2x2GB DDR2-800). Put a reasonably ok power supply, Antec Earthwatts I forget how many watts. System has never given me any trouble really. Despite that the CPU was low end even when I bought it, it hasn't been a bottleneck so I guess I've been a pretty light user. I did eventually pair it up with a GTX460 1GB as the onboard video was lacking even for CSS.

I was thrilled when I first got my SSD, it was a huge upgrade probably the best upgrade for the $ that could have happened. I couldn't believe how fast everything felt. hehehe

I have been running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I passed by completely on Vista, saw too many people with issues so I kept XP until I finally did this build.

I did see something about RAID in the BIOS actually. I believe it said "RAID MODE - IDE", I'll have to double check though.

 

[Binky]

If you paid $40 for the MB two years ago...it's pretty old tech.

 

[exdeath]

Sigh... I really hate seeing people having all these problems with SSDs. They really just need to work, now, for everybody in every computer.

Spinning magnetic 1950s technology really needs to go extinct and be buried with punch cards, cassette tapes, floppy disks and optical disks. I mean seriously, you coat a toilet paper roll with metal dust, spin it, and then use a straw with a loop of wire on the end of it to read and write data, and you have the "technology" we've been trusting to store and retrieve our data at kilobits per sec speeds for over 6 decades. Quite pathetic for a species that prides itself on it's awesome technology.

I work with PCs all day and I'm tired of waiting 30 mins for a damn email client to install (granted it is a big piece of garbage bloated software to begin with and starts with an "L").

After all we built computers to be faster than us, not to sit around waiting for hourglasses and progress bars and listen to crunching all day long.

 

[groberts101]

not to add to the "let's beat up on zCypher for being so cheap" posts here(only teasing bud).. but Binky has a good point more or less.

The main thing to consider there is that the mobo(and bios) in question, is going to be older than the controller used in the SSD. Now while most SSD's should have no problem being backwards compatible?.. we're not talking about "most controller's" here and Sandforce is undoubtedly THE worst when it comes to compatibility. I've even seen many OEM systems where the Sandforce is fine on one model.. and then 1 model up or one model down will have slight variations to bios and add conflict with this picky-ass controller.

I often tell people that the only time to use a Sandforce controller is when there is a proven "good recipe" to validate the chance of success. Out of 7 other system's of friends and family members who wanted "the same drive's I use" after seeing my system in action?.. only 3 have SF SSD installed. All others(some of which are Dell's) are running different controllers.

and @exdeath. Funny stuff and so very true. Takes a human being a whole friggin' lifetime to learn the ropes.. then we're too damned old to make use of most of the knowledge ourselve's.. then of course, no one younger will even listen/learn from our mistake's and somehow feels the urge to learn things all on their own in some sort of twisted masochistic tendency. It seems we're often the dumbest "smart species" on earth.

 

[zCypher]

lol Lotus, now that is fail. Thankfully I don't use that where I work now.
heh, I found the order from when I built this thing. It was actually in August 2009,

Cooler Master 690 - $79
Antec Earthwatts 650w - $59
E5200 - $69
MSI G31M3L V2 - $49
Corsair 2x2GB DDR2-800 - $69

My first 1TB WD Black (32MB cache) was $99, the second one (64MB cache) was $79 later on in January, along with a GTX 460 SE 1GB for $169.

 

[zCypher]

Still waiting for reply from RMA, I did get a message saying it's approved though and they will be sending me instructions.