Windows 7 hang with Intel SSD 320 under Rapid Storage mirror

[Richard_A_Intel]

I've been narrowing down the cause of a easy to occur Windows 7 hang when using the Intel SSD 320 160Gbyte drive.

Some versioning:

Rapid Storage 10.6.0.1002

SSD 320 firmware 4PC10302

On ASUS P8Z68VPRO, with Core i7-2600 3.4GHz, 8G memory, Windows 7 64bit

I have two 320 drives mirrored as the system disk. And I have 4 conventional hard drives as RAID-10 under Rapid Storage.

I found that booting and simply starting the Task Manager and clicking into Performance, showing the CPU busy bars, and let the machine sit idle, will result in a hang within 1 hour. Very consistently.

By hang I mean typically the Task Manager window stops scrolling the CPU busy bars, or may go blank. Mousing over it shows the green donut busy cursor. Other windows can still be selected, and sometimes Firefox can even start up. Usually such other windows do lock up after a few clicks. If the first thing I do is a Shutdown, this sometimes hangs and sometimes succeeds.

Booting with "Clean boot" mode (disable all non-Microsoft drivers and services) doesn't help. The same hang occurs. This workaround doesn't help:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_programs/windows-7-cannot-close-s... http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_programs/windows-7-cannot-close-s...

Based on a posting from earlier this year, http://communities.intel.com/message/119032# 119032 http://communities.intel.com/message/119032# 119032,

I did set the 2 ports to supposedly disable LPM mode. This made no difference.

I've done a number of experiments, and have no hangs within several hours of idle system when booting the same OS image from a non-RAID single conventional drive. I also have not seen hangs when booting the same SSD as non-RAID single drive. non-RAID means Rapid Storage reports the drive as not being in any RAID config, and the BIOS still has the ports set to RAID mode.

Further, I mirrored the pair of SSDs, then removed one drive, and ran as RAID-Degraded. This also hangs. And then switch to the other drive and it also hangs.

So the strong correlation is: the SSD drive is hanging when using Rapid Storage mirroring.

My goal is to achieve mirrored SSD drives. What next?

[Richard_A_Intel]

I found a workaround for this problem, which allows me to use Intel Rapid Storage mirror with SSD 320 drive pair. Although the LPM disable via registry entries for DIPM and LPM and LPMSTATE did *not* work, going into the Power control panel and setting the power option to disable "Turn off hard disk after" did work!

Start Control Panel, Search for power, select "Change power-saving settings", for whichever power plan is selected (I use Balanced), click "Change plan settings". On this page select "Change advanced power settings". This brings up a small Power Options window. In the Power Options window, scroll down to Hard Disk, and click on the + to expand it. Click on the + "Turn off hard disk after", click on the Settings Minutes, and down arrow the value to Never.

Then click Apply. By choosing this setting, now my SSD 320 mirror does not hang, after 12 hours of running. Furthermore I removed the DIPM/LPM/LPMSTATE settings from the registry, and also find they have absolutely no effect. I have no hangs by setting Turn off hard disk after: Never, and without entering those registry settings.

Finally I will comment the common posting of the LPM registry settings shows entering a value for parameter LPMDSTATE (with a D), and according to this Intel documentation there is no such parameter. The parameter value is LPMSTATE (no D).

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/serial-ata/sata-devices-implementation-recommendations.htm... http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/serial-ata/sata-devices-implementation-recommendations.htm...

I hope this may be helpful to others seeing Windows 7 hanging with the use of Intel Rapid Storage and SSD 320 drives.