Intel 510 SSD 120gb - Random Freezes and Boot Failure

[idata]

Hi, I've been running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on an Intel 510 SSD 120gb drive just fine for almost 18 months. About a month ago I began running into random lockups on my computer. I'd open Firefox or Outlook and the computer would hang. The window would turn really white and opaque. I could still move the mouse cursor around but couldn't do anything else. Couldn't Ctrl Alt Del or bring up Task Manager via Ctrl Shift Esc. So i can only force a restart/shutdown. It only happened once or twice a week, and I thought nothing of it.

But in the last 3 days it's been happening several times a day. It can happen at any time without warning, it doesn't matter what I'm doing. I've the computer unattended and come back to it frozen up. I've even left it at the Windows log in screen before, came back and it was frozen. I could be browsing the web, go to open a new tab, and it freezes up. There doesn't appear to be any pattern or direct cause.

Sometimes when i force restart, the system fails to boot from the drive. BIOS still detects the drive but it won't boot from it, it falls back on my DVD drive and asks me to insert boot media. If I restart a few more times or shut it down, wait a little, and turn the computer on, it'll successfully boot into Windows.

Yesterday I ran chkdsk (schedule from windows) and it found 48kb of bad sectors. I run HD tune and found same situation

I download intel ssd toolbox and run a Full Diagnostic Scan : FAILS ever at 22% of first test ( during checking every logical block address (LBA) for READ errors) telling me contact reseller or Intel

There are no indications of failure in the SMART attributes and fast diagnostics passes.

Should I contact Intel and start an RMA process?

[KenF_Intel]

Hi Roberto,

Yes, contact our support center. They may have some troubleshooting steps for you and can assist with RMA if that is necessary. Be sure to back up your data at the earliest opportunity!

The starting point for contacting support is:

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contactsupport http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contactsupport

[idata]

I would like to thank the support intel, thanks to their information appears to have been resolved all, in fact when I format my ssd with intel tool, the problem with bad blocks is gone. It remains to see if the symptoms linked to the freeze are not present but i am more hopeful now