520 series system freezes win 8 pro

[idata]

Hi people.

I bought a 520 Series 120 GB SSD from TigerDirect. It was not an OEM type sale. The disk was manufactured on December 22 2012. I installed the disk in late February, but didn't finish the installation until early March.

This box has an ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo board (BIOS up to date) and a E8400 Core Duo processor running Windows 8 Pro, x64. I have the FSB set to 350 instead of the default 333. Before you say "try it set to defaults," I did; didn't change anything. After installing the latest INF update, Intel RST drivers, and the Intel Toolbox 3.12, I tried the quick disk diagnostic. The system froze. Disk activity went to 100% and I got the "soft blue" screen of death. While it (the OS) said it was collecting information about the issue, it wasn't. The system rebooted just fine. It always reboots fine, like nothing happened, except Windows loses many settings.

It seemed like this may have been related to the toolbox as using features usually resulted in a crash, but not always. I finally removed the Toolbox and tried the Windows optimize feature, the system did the optimization, but mere seconds after, disk activity on the 520 went to 100% and the system eventually crashed. I had task manger running so I could see disk activity, of which there was none, but the disk light was brightly and constantly lit. It required a hard reset, after which it was fine. This is the typical way the system crashes on this drive. Previously, I had an 128 GB M4 SSD2 installed without issue.

I've looked through quite a bit stuff about freezing 520 drives and it seems clear that I should do low-level format. Not that I want to. I've installed win8 about six or seven times, trying different things, like with the Media Center edition and without and assorted stuff like that. I'm getting tired of re-installing the OS. I would like know to if putting a system image back on the same disk after a low-level format is a good idea.

At this point all ideas are welcome. Any ideas? System specs in image.

[idata]

OK, more calm and composed and writing this in Word so it doesn't get lost.

Previously, on this box, I had Win7 Pro, x64 installed on a M4 SSD2. I didn't have Windows 7 support

on this board then, but it didn't seem to affect anything as far as I was concerned. The system was rock stable and performed very nicely for a collection of old hardware.

Before I installed the M4 SSD in Win7, I did some research which appeared to imply that the best results would be had from installing the SSD formatted through diskpart, to guarantee the partition offset was correct,

and that there would be no hidden system partition that could wreak havoc with Acronis. So, a while ago, I set the board to AHCI mode and installed the OS. All good.

Then I got Win8, and didn't have any problems with that, either. I have a third computer that I figured I would upgrade the disk, that's when I started looking around looking at SSDs to see what might be good. I had read good things about the 520 and was able to purchase a new one cheap.

I hooked it up to this box so I could get it formatted and run some benches on it. I decided to fit the 520 instead of the M4 because the 520 bested the M4 in seq. reads and 4K writes. I had what appeared to be a better disk, why shouldn't I? After imaging the system drive and swapping drives, Acronis let me down and couldn't put the system image on the 520. But the M4 was intact and I swapped that back in until I had more time to work on getting the 520 in.

I did a fresh install on the 520. The chipset didn't go in on the first try,

but it did on the second. I had a lot of trouble getting drivers installed for a PCI USB3 card. And it started randomly crashing. I don't remember what I was doing to make it crash, but they was a happening. I was ready to RMA the thing when it seemed to get its act together. I did get the toolbox installed and was ableto run a one full disk diagnostic (usually, running any feature other than reading SMART data freaks the disk out, or so it appeared). According to the toolbox, my disk is hunky-dory.

Actually, after the disk wore in, the system worked pretty

well. The toolbox is gone. Apparently, as long as I don't try trim, everythingis copasetic. This is a desktop, always on, with the power plan set to high performance. I've looked over things like LPM, DIPM, and halt states, haven't had any luck with any of those settings. It seems clear there's some setting that I'm missing, I just don't know what it is.

[idata]

May have found the answer. Raised Southbridge voltage 0.1 V. It's too early to tell, but it seems to be crash proof.