Intel 320 120GB SSD with Dell E6410 major freezing issue...

[idata]

I have a Dell E6410 with a new Intel 320 120GB SSD installed. Loaded a fresh copy of Windows 7 Pro 32bit and all of the latest Dell and Intel drivers and Microsoft updates. With this config, the Dell will randomly lock up (complete freeze requiring a po/po) within 30 minutes or so. Looking in the Event Viewer, there is nothing specific that indicates what service, driver, etc may be causing the problem.

Here's what I did to troubleshoot. Formatted the SSD and reinstalled Win 7 Pro 32bit from scratch. Once the initial desktop loaded, it will lock up within 30 mins. I have a Western Digital 160GB 5400RPM drive and perform the exact same install and it will not lock up at all. Ran diagnostics and all hardware checked out fine...even swapped memory modules.

With both drives I tried all 3 SATA modes (reinstalling Win7 for each one): AHCI, RAID and ATA...SSD always locks, but the Western Digital doesn't. There is some sort of incompatibility between the Dell E6410 and Intel 320 120GB drive.

PLEASE HELP INTEL! I didn't expect to get this type of behavior with your SSDs on a Dell.

Thanks,

James

[idata]

Would you please attempting running a Secure Erase of the SSD while it is attached as a non-primary drive?

[idata]

Yes, I will try that. I'm assumming then a reload as I've already done?

Thanks,

Jamie

[idata]

I forget to add that the freeze problem does not occur when in safe mode. Thanks.

[idata]

Ok, I have an update to this issue...

After tons of troubleshooting, I've determined that the lock ups are related or partially related to the Turbo Boost driver that is installed with the Intel HD graphics driver. Since the freezing problem didn't occur in Safe Mode, I figured it had something to do with some driver being loaded and not playing well with the 320 SSD. Safe Mode with networking worked fine, so it wasn't the network drivers. After disabling almost everything else, I remembered that the Turbo Boost was loaded with the graphics drivers, which of course don't load in Safe Mode.

I then decided to disable Turbo Boost in the BIOS and uninstalled and deleted the Turbo Boost driver. After doing this the hard locks went from every 5-20 minutes to once over a span of 2.5 hours. I'm still not out of the woods yet, but that's the latest.

INTEL, do you have any thoughts on this?

Thank you,

James