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]

EEGeek,

My apology, I did not intend to offend only to help. You are an engineer and worked for Micron you should know that the memory they make is good and in few instances distributed hardware is bad. I have the impression that you are well placed to resolve your issue.

Good luck,

Roland

[idata]

Just wanted to let you know:

It seems its been more than a month that I posted this problem and no real fix yet. I had a feeling it'd be this way and would like to say thanks to w00thisButtonDo. I had bought my SSDSA2MH080G1 on sale, before the prices went up, so I was very much reluctant to RMA it, but his message helped me to make up my mind and I returned it asap. Kudos to neweeg, as all it took for me to say was that I had compatibility issues and they gave me RMA, even though the drive was with "No return for refund" policy. So with broken heart I RMAed it.

About 1-2 weeks later, neweeg had another sale, and this one was pretty damn awesome. I bought SSDSA2MH080G2R5 for $240. Thats a RETAIL G2 drive and it came with FREE Icy Dock MB882SP-1S-1B 2.5" to 3.5" HDD Converter, worth $25. Thats only $10 more that I paid for OEM G1, that I've returned. Well, at this point I'm gonna repeat my thanks to w00thisButtonDo, as I would've never bought a second drive, haven't I returned my first one, no matter how good of a deal this was.

I have waited to be sure, before posting here. Now I can report, that I've installed windows 7 on the first try, no freezes, no hicups of any kind. I haven't made ANY ssd related tweaks to windows itself, except moving my folders from c:\Users to another (non sdd) drive. Win7 is running smooth and freaking fast for more than a week now. No problems what so ever. Here you go.

Obviously its not a solution youre looking for (I was looking for too) and I appologise. But at least you can plainly see, that there WAS a problem with G1. Same hardware, same software, the only thing changed was the drive. Thats it.

I very much hope this issue will be fixed soon.

[idata]

Anyone have solved this problem yet? Or is the only solution to send back your SSD drive?

[idata]

Hi, we are half way to solving the problem, it doesnt look like a problem with the SSD as we had 2 of these do exactley the same thing, one more then the other, it turns out that even when we put in a normal HDD we got the same problem. so we have narrowed it down to our gigabyte Mobo. both systems are running nearly stable. We increased the ram voltage slightly, disabled ram turbo, and proccessor turbo, and turned of the intelegent proccessor function. now everything is working ok

Regards

[idata]

So the "test system" is working now after you tweaked the settings? did you lose any performance with this tweaking?

Could you write a small guide on how to tweak it so I wont have this freeze problem? It would be really awesome because this is a huge problem for me when my PC freezes randomly when I'm doing different kind of work and projects.

Thanks in advance!