RST Driver Lockup / Freezes (Win7 x64 w/2 x 80GB X25-M G2)

[idata]

Hello all,

I have reviewed some of the other posts in the forum, but haven't found any that directly address what I am experiencing with my configuration.

As always, it is a challenge to troubleshoot the source of the issue - driver? mobo BIOS? etc.

I just purchased two 80GB SSD X25-M G2 drives (SSDSA2MH080G2C1). I connected them to my PC, I have an EVGA x58 Micro motherboard with updated BIOS.

In the BIOS, I have it set to "RAID" which the documentation indicates to me means that AHCI is enabled.

Installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 64-bit.

I installed the RST driver set in Windows and am able to see that the drives have NCQ enabled etc (that indicates AHCI is working, right? wrong?).

I have run CrystalDiskMark benchmarks and the performance was outstanding.

Through usage, be it web browsing (watching some Hulu) or playing games Modern Warfare 2, eventually the system freezes. It is not a blue screen, but it becomes non-responsive (task manager won't open, etc).

I changed the Windows driver installed to the Intel MSM drivers 8.9 set, and this lock up/freezing does NOT happen. However the benchmarks post statistically significant lower numbers performance-wise than with the RST drivers.

I installed the RST drivers from the Lenovo site 9.5.7.x listed in a post on this forum, and the freeze/lockups returned.

I am happy with the drive performance with the MSM drivers, it is damn quick, but it is bugging me that there is a 10-15% gain I could have with the RST drivers but there is no system stability.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[idata]

Out of interest, you're not running Kaspersky antivirus/internet security are you Hajji?

[idata]

Ozz wrote:

Out of interest, you're not running Kaspersky antivirus/internet security are you Hajji?

Hey there Ozz,

Sorry about the late response. No I run Microsoft Security Essentials.

So I un-RAIDed my drives, per another thread I started, and have them individually so that TRIM is supported. Running RST drivers with no lockups since. So maybe it is an issue of the RAID not playing well with the drivers.

[idata]

Ah, you running the new RST v9.6s?

[idata]

I'm having a similar problem. I have two 120gb Intel X25-M SSDs in RAID-0 on an ASRock P67 Extreme4 mainboard with the 2600k Sandy Bridge CPU and 16gb of memory. After a lot of testing and experimenting I found the following: A fresh install of Win7 64-bit ultimate WITHOUT the F6 RST driver during install results in a system that does NOT freeze after being left idle for 15-30 minutes. After installing the RST driver the system will freeze after sitting idle for 15 minutes. This is also the case if I install the driver while installing Win7 (F6). I found that the power plan was set to power off the disk drives after 15 minutes so I reduced that to 5 minutes and sure enough the freeze happens after 5 minutes of idle time and the system never comes back to life - can't even start task manager - I have to reset the PC. When I set the power plan to NEVER power off the disk drives then it does not freeze - ever. I have not found a work around to this but have found that this is NOT a problem on Vista 64-bit Ultimate on the same hardware. Also, the PC wakes up fine from sleep even with the RST driver installed. There is either a problem with Windows 7 or the RST driver or some interaction between the two. My only solution is to (1) set the drives to never turn off or (2) go back to Vista.

[idata]

Many thanks to rwp1993, this was the solution to my lockup problem!

My new build uses a Gigabyte P67A-UD7-B3 mainboard with a Core i5 2500k CPU. OS is Win 7 Pro 64-bit.

I'm running two raid arrays off the P67 chipset:

- Array 1 is Raid 0, two WD 320 GB SATA III Caviar Blue drives.

- Array 2 is Raid 5, four WD 1 TB SATA II RE4s.

Array 1 is the system drive, and an image of it will be maintained on Array 2. I say "will be." because until now I've been fighting this lockup problem, and haven't yet set up the utility that will update the image. Add me to the list of people breathing a big sigh of relief.