SSD 510 Series Drive Access Lockup

[idata]

I am seeing some odd behavior with my SSDSC2MH250A2 drives. I have two of these connected to my DX58SO2 motherboard. What was happening was that access to my second SSD drive would cause Windows to freeze. The OS itself would hang while trying to access to drive. I was not sure what was causing this, and I thought I had defective hardware at first.

I had to hold down the power button due to some of these freezes. After doing this, I ran a chkdsk /f for both drives followed by rebooting to ensure the file system was intact. My second SSD drive was even freezeing or extremely slow during the chkdsk. I had to hold down the power button during one chkdsk after it reported unexpected errors.

I ran Intel's SSD Toolbox followed by running the SSD Optimizer for both drives. After doing this, the freezing issues seemed to have stopped. Here is where I am confused though-- I am running Windows 7 Professional, and the Intel PDFs I have read stated that the functionality of the SSD Optimizer is built into Windows 7. This leads me to believe I should not need to run the optimizer.

I do not understand why the SSD drives would cause the OS to hang after about three weeks of use. I can find no firmware updates for the 510 series at all.

[idata]

I am still installing all software back onto my desktop. I am about 90% complete.

I do not know if my issue is resolved, because I was at this same point without issue when I first got the desktop. The SSD drive locking up happened later after a couple hours of use. The only thing that was done in my case was different SATA cables used. I do not know what cables, but I can ask the tech. Again, it's too soon to know if my issue is even resolved.

One other odd thing I have noticed is after I installed Intel's SSD Toolbox, I am not able to run the optimize. It states that my drive is not compatible with this feature. It was not showing that before I reinstalled Windows, so I am not sure why it is showing it now.

[idata]

Could this issue be of influence?

Please see: http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/Identify_B3_Motherboards/ http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/Identify_B3_Motherboards/

On January 31, 2011 Intel® announced the detection of a design error in the new Intel® 6 Series support chipset, also known as Cougar Point.

ASUS has updated all motherboards with revised Intel® 6 series B3 chipsets, with every SATA port now certified safe to use and the Cougar Point

support chip issue resolved.........

[idata]

I had already exchanged my Asus P8P67 Pro board for the new B3 stepping model, back in March 2011.

[idata]

It looks like the change of cables did resolve this issue for me.

It turns out that the DX58SO2 motherboard I was posting about was defective too. I had an RMA shipped next day from Intel. What is interesting is that a new install of Windows 7 shows a windows experience index score of 7.8 for the same SSD drives and not 7.9.

Something else I learned from all these Windows 7 installs is the reason the SSD Toolbox disables the optimize feature is due to installing the Marvel SATA3 drivers. I am not running raid and am not sure why the software would disable optimize in this case, but it does it anyway. The reason I installed the Marvel driver is a device shows under the device manager as unknown unless I install either the 9xxx or 6xxx Marvel driver.

[idata]

One last post from me on this thread:

Windows Experience Index now consistently shows 7.9 for my primary hard drive. As to why it was showing 7.8 before, that was after a new install with only the Intel drivers and INF files installed. My guess is that the megs and megs of Windows update installs may have led to the drive performance gain. I'm not really sure though.