Intel X25-M G1 80GB SSD hangs/freezes in Windows 7

[idata]

About a week ago, I bought Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA II MLC from NewEgg.com.

I plugged in the new SSD as my main (OS) drive (all my specs are in my sig.) and started installing Windows 7. During install I split the drive into 2 partitions: 20GB for win7 & the rest. On the first attempt win7 install froze at "completing installation" stage, iirc. As it was only my 2nd attempt to install windows 7, and first attempt to install it on the desktop pc, I waited for it to "unfreeze" or continue for ~30 min. Finally I gave up and had to push the reset button. I did my first windows 7 install that very same day on my Acer AO751h netbook and it went smoothly and pretty **** fast (and is still working perfectly).

On the second attempt I was able to install windows 7 successfully. I deleted partitions during second install and recreated/formatted only 1 partition 20GB for win7. The 2nd partition I created/formatted already in windows 7. Just after installation, on my first log in to windows 7, I installed Acronis True Image Home 2009 and tried to create an image of my fresh win7 OS partition. That is something I always do, I like having last fresh windows install image for quick "fresh restore", especially in this case, as I knew there are numerous tweaks to be made, to optimize SSD drive usage. Creating the image failed, as True Image software froze and shortly after-wards windows completely froze as well. At that point I had 5 Seagate 1.5TB (ST31500341AS) drives connected to my pc. Knowing the story behind those drives and from my own experience (from the 17 Seagate 1,5TB drives I had, 2 developed freezing/hanging problems), I obviously suspected the problem was one of them. I disconnected all drives, but Intel's SSD and tried to make partition image again. I probably tried 5-6 times and all attempts failed. By now I wasn't sure, maybe True Image was not working properly on windows 7, so I gave up on making image. I used windows 7 for a couple of days, applied tweaks for SSD, like moving paging file, temp files, disabling system restore, hibernation, indexing, superfetch, defrag, firefox memory cache, etc. Windows 7 was flying, I was ecstatic seeing the performance of windows. Though time from time, windows would just freeze up and nothing helped, but the reset button.

I started googling for solutions. All I could find, that maybe Intel SSDs have trouble with nForce chipsets (ironically, neweeg product review that was posted just yesterday put me on this track).

The questions I would like to ask:

What software should I use to diagnose this SSD? I could not find any tools on Intels site, and googling for SSD diagnostic tools gave me nothing.

Is the incompatibility of nForce chipset an Intel SSD the main and only reason for these hangs and freezes? Does the new G2 drives have this problem as well? If it is, I need to think about returning this drive.

Any other ideas/solutions?

I'd be very disappointed to return it, after experiencing the performance boost it delivered, when it was working

Thanks in advance.

[idata]

I am having this issue as well. I have the Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard using the drive in AHCI mode. My machine would freeze every time I would resume from S3 sleep. It was a kinda weird freeze though. Applications were still running, mouse was still moving, and the gui was generally responsive, until I tried to dive deeper into anything, as if it hung while accessing the drive. At first I thought it was my overclock, so I reset that, no dice. It now will freeze even when I'm not resuming. I'll hop into Aion and be playing for random amounts of time when it'll happen. The game will freeze up, then come back again, then ultimately freeze up until it BSOD's. At BIOS post after the BSOD, I'll get a SMART command failure on the Intel X25-M line of the SATA detection screen. It won't go away until I actually shut the machine down and turn it back on.

Last point, when it starts to freeze, the hdd activity light is on solid.

[idata]

Folks,

Just a suggestion, but Windows 7 is supposed to have support for the SSD related "trim" command built into it. I read somewhere that the X25-M SSDs were currently not capable of supporting this function, until some sort of firmware update comes out (down the line a bit). The issues that are being experienced with these drives "might" be related to this. Windows 7 somehow thinking that the Intel SSD has support for the command built in and working. It's supposed to be a background process that marks certain parts of the SSD for re-use. As a background process, it would kick in at different times... kinda like indexing etc.

Just an thought.....

Scientia

[idata]

I don't think that is an issue. Windows would only implement trim on drives that had hardware calls that would reply back acknowledging their support for trim. Windows doesn't just have a list of names of drives and when it sees the intel drive installed, ASSUMES that it must then have trim. Especially since, until Intel tells them otherwise, their drives do NOT currently support trim. The fact that they've stated there will be a firmware update available wouldn't mean somehow Microsoft read that press release and hardcoded Windows 7 to force trim on those drives.

More importantly, that theory wouldn't explain the symptoms. I believe it's a compatibility issue between the AHCI driver (potentially the ncq portion) and the drive. There's also the possibilty that Windows 7 is part of the compatibility problem, but it's unlikely; your driver should be the complete solution for a specific version of hardware to run on a given OS. There's also the possibility that there's issues with specific hardware revisions of the SATA controller that can't be remedied with an updated driver.

[idata]

Hi, we have the same problem. We have recently built 2 machines exactly the same spec except the graphics cards.

Motherboard Gigabyte P55M-UD2

Proccessor i7 Quad core

Ram 4 GB

HDD Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB SSD

Graphics card Machine One is a Radeon HD4670 1024MB DDr3,

Machine Two is a ASUS EAH 3650 246MB DDr3

Machine one has windows 7 on and his completly ok and stable.

Machine two however is far from it, loaded windows 7 on once and it failed to allow any windows updates, so thinking it was only a quick install i installed it again, this froze at the gathering updates stage, went to run setup again but it would not boot, so turned of AHCI and reisntalled windows all seemed ok reloaded again with ahci turned on and it was completly unstable, blue screened every 5 minutes with a page file error, reloaded once more and all seems ok accept now it crashes and freezes at random intervals and i am no clsoer to fixing it, does anyone have any ideas ?

[idata]

Someone reported a problem using driver in Windows 7 that was fixed using the Intel driver.So those of you experiencing issues might want to update your AHCI driver from Intel. Give it a try and report here.