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SSD woes

Juddog

Juddog

Diamond Member
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As mentioned below, I had a regular hard drive working in this system with none of the same issues.

Backstory:
I picked up a used 60GB OCZ Vertex on the cheap, at the time was about $70 under the newegg price, purchased off of a friend. I ran the firmware update on it, and it seemed to be running great - very fast read / write speeds.

A few months later, and now I'm noticing I'm getting service failures in windows 7. It's not that the services won't start, it's that they hang or take longer than they should, and since the rest of windows boots up so fast I get typically Aero-disabled theme and an ugly desktop. I can manually restart the service(s), log off, log back on again and it works great. Typically the services which are failing are "system event notification" and another service which deals with group policy.

I am suspecting the SSD is somehow loading parts of windows too fast and stalling when it comes to operations on some of the services. I have windows 7 on an SSD at work (Intel X25-M G2) and it works flawlessly, with none of the issues that I'm experiencing with the Vertex listed above.

I'm wondering if anybody else has experienced something like this on their drive and what was done to fix it. Either that or I can just upgrade to another SSD, but I really don't want to jump on an Intel until their new G3's come out late 2010 / early 2011. I'm also considering buying a velociraptor as the boot volume and using the SSD as a game launching drive, since it does load things quite fast compared with what I'm used to.
 
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Have you tried replacing the SATA cable.

I'm on a intel 160GB G2 and my machine randomly crashed on me a few times I couldn't put a finger on why for alteast a month. When its been rock solid during game, Folding etc.

Turned out the SATA cable attached to my drive somehow went bad, I've never had a cable go bad on me with IDE cable unless physically damaged.

After replacing the cable everything is back to normal.
 
Makaveli said:
Have you tried replacing the SATA cable.

I'm on a intel 160GB G2 and my machine randomly crashed on me a few times I couldn't put a finger on why for alteast a month. When its been rock solid during game, Folding etc.

Turned out the SATA cable attached to my drive somehow went bad, I've never had a cable go bad on me with IDE cable unless physically damaged.

After replacing the cable everything is back to normal.
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Currently using a brand new SATA cable, but I can swap it out to another if you think it would make a difference. I can also try swapping it to another port on the motherboard; right now it resides on the Marvell controller which is SATA 6G, but I can test it out with a 3G / SATA2 port using another cable.
 
What happens when you revert to an image from around the time you changed to the SSD? If the problem goes away, you can rule out the SSD.
 
If you have access to Windows install disk, you could do a fresh install and see if you still have the issue. Use Imaging SW to make an image of your current system, so you can easily come back to it. I use Macrium Reflect with the default settings, but use whatever you like.

Once you have a current image you can come back to, wipe your OS partition, and do a fresh install. Just load a few basic programs, and it shouldn't take long at all. The slowest part will be reading off the DVD, but if you create an image of the fresh install, it will just take a few minutes to go back to it in the future.
 
Try downgrading the firmware ,,, maybe you shouldn't of done that firmware update like you did. thx gl,
 
tweakboy said:
Try downgrading the firmware ,,, maybe you shouldn't of done that firmware update like you did. thx gl,
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Bullshit as usual.

Check if and what kind of errors appear in the windows event logs, use a win7 dvd to repair the install and see if that fixes anything.

If not I fear the next solution would be fresh install since you don't have a backup you can be sure is ok.
 
Voo said:
Bullshit as usual.

Check if and what kind of errors appear in the windows event logs, use a win7 dvd to repair the install and see if that fixes anything.

If not I fear the next solution would be fresh install since you don't have a backup you can be sure is ok.
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I did run a repair with windows, after which it was working fine for about a day then back to the same problem again. Essentially it seems that the drive is taking longer to access certain areas versus others. This problem was non-existent the first month or so that I had the drive. I can continually fix the issue but every time I reboot after the computer having been powered off a while it comes back again. If the computer is running for a while and I reboot the problem doesn't occur; it's only from a cold boot.

After digging around on other forums it appears that I'm probably going to have to RMA the drive if it's still under warranty.
 
Essentially what is causing the problems in windows is that the drive just occasionally freezes for what seems a super short time but long enough to muck things up. I'm not sure how else to explain it.
 
Juddog said:
I did run a repair with windows, after which it was working fine for about a day then back to the same problem again. Essentially it seems that the drive is taking longer to access certain areas versus others.
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Well you see, even if that was true, it still shouldn't affect the OS in any way. Point in case: Remember those awful micron drives with up to 1 1/2 seconds random access time? Those still worked "perfectly" fine under Windows.

What kind of errors do appear in the error log?
 
Voo said:
Well you see, even if that was true, it still shouldn't affect the OS in any way. Point in case: Remember those awful micron drives with up to 1 1/2 seconds random access time? Those still worked "perfectly" fine under Windows.

What kind of errors do appear in the error log?
Click to expand...

Typically they are "X service did not start" type of errors. I can manually go through and start the services and they start fine. They only occur half the time; if the computer is "warm" meaning after a reboot, they typically don't occur, it's only after a cold boot. If I restart the services, log off then log back on again the services are fine.

Yesterday when I got home, I started the system for instance it came up with no errors at all.
 
Really strange problem - I'm not so sure that it's really a SSD problem though, since as I said just long access times don't cause problems. If you've already googled the Event ID (that should be more specific about what exactly caused it) and didn't find any solutions for that specific solutions, I'd install a fresh version and see if that helps.. just doesn't sound like a HW failiure to me.
 
Voo said:
Bullshit as usual.

Check if and what kind of errors appear in the windows event logs, use a win7 dvd to repair the install and see if that fixes anything.

If not I fear the next solution would be fresh install since you don't have a backup you can be sure is ok.
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Your a very nice guy Voo
 
You making fun of me saying b*ll sh*t to my suggestion. Whats your problem aint getting enough lovin at home or something. What right you have to talk to me that way. Your probably a young kid cuz no grown man would call another grown mans suggestion and say the bad words you used against me. Admin please give him 1 infraction and a warning. Jealousy what can you do? Thank you
 
Back to helping the guy/girl... I'm suspecting that it's not the SSD and it's probably your elaborate system. You mention it happens after it's been up for awhile. Of course I'm assuming this SSD is on your overclocked system. If it is on your overclocked system, I would run it back all at stock then run sfc /scannow.

Either way since you have two systems, you can isolate if it is a drive issue by swapping disks (image one using Win7, directly copy from one to the 2nd, then restore the image back on the 1st). It shouldn't take too long with SSDs and plugging directly to the drive controllers. Have fun.
 
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razel said:
Back to helping the guy/girl... I'm suspecting that it's not the SSD and it's probably your elaborate system. You mention it happens after it's been up for awhile. Of course I'm assuming this SSD is on your overclocked system. If it is on your overclocked system, I would run it back all at stock then run sfc /scannow.

Either way since you have two systems, you can isolate if it is a drive issue by swapping disks (image one using Win7, directly copy from one to the 2nd, then restore the image back on the 1st). It shouldn't take too long with SSDs and plugging directly to the drive controllers. Have fun.
Click to expand...

To clarify, using a regular drive in the system in question work perfectly fine. The issue is with the SSD. Also the problem occurs typically on cold boot, as if the drive needs time to "warm up" so to speak. If I leave the system running 24 hours in a row the drive has plenty of snappy reaction time. I've already tried the system repair, double checking every service message one by one, and the single point of issue always points to the SSD in question.

Hopefully it's still under warranty so that I can RMA it; if not then I'll switch over to another drive.
 
Well first I'd try is putting the SSD on a standard port (hopefully an Intel one), because the Marvel controllers and drivers suck ass SATA3 or not. A standard Intel SATA2 port will do most everything better and faster than a Marvel SATA3 port in doing the kind of operations that Windows usually does things.
 
Juddog said:
Typically they are "X service did not start" type of errors. I can manually go through and start the services and they start fine. They only occur half the time; if the computer is "warm" meaning after a reboot, they typically don't occur, it's only after a cold boot. If I restart the services, log off then log back on again the services are fine.

Yesterday when I got home, I started the system for instance it came up with no errors at all.
Click to expand...

What PSU are you running? SSD or not clean power is important.
 
I find it almost impossible to believe that the SSD has anything to do with this. It seems more likely that some files have been corrupted and the services won't load for that reason (windows changes the order that services load each boot, so if a service stops the system booting, a reboot may get you a working system to fix the problem).

Other probe that can cause this are bad drivers, or an unstable CPU.

You really need to return to stock, and reformat clean install. By all means take a backup image of the drive before in case it doesn't fix things.
 
I am suspecting the SSD is somehow loading parts of windows too fast and stalling when it comes to operations on some of the services.
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This is impossible... windows doesn't "stall" from "loading too fast". you are thinking of car engines.

It seems more likely that some files have been corrupted and the services won't load for that reason
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Most likely, this is VERY VERY common in windows. File corruption typically occurs when applying windows patches, windows patches are often buggy and break windows completely by being incompatible with previous patches which they replace (in a clean install, you would not install the previous patch anymore, since it has been replaced), and if you have an unstable overclock then even a non bugged out windows patch can break windows... one single bit error during applying a windows update will result in having corrupt OS files.

NEVER overclock while installing windows itself or windows patches. Disable OC, apply patches, enable OC, play games... if an OC causes a point error in a game, no biggie, if it causes it while installing a windows patch you need to reinstall windows to fix it.

Anyways, I would suspect other components before I suspect the SSD, but it CAN be the SSD... some SSDs are just defective, thats what a warranty is for.
 
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