Intel 520 SSD causes system to lock up on format

[CHudk]

Hello!

I'm in charge of our company's fleet of managed assets. A few days ago, a problem surfaced with 240GB 520 series SSDs, utilized in Lenovo W510 laptops.

Summary: Upon clearing all partitions from the drive, creating a 2GiB and a 222GiB (approximate size), and attempting to format the larger one, after about a minute the entire system locks up, requiring a hard power-off.

Details

This is a scripted process, however for troubleshooting purposes I have also done it by hand, with the same result. The steps involved are:

1. PXE boot into Windows PE.
2. Remove all partitions (PowerShell Clear-Disk -RemoveData -RemoveOEM).
3. Initialize the disk (Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle MBR)
4. Create a 2GiB partition and a second one using all remaining space (New-Partition ...)
5. Format both partitions to NTFS (Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -AllocationUnitSize 4096)
   1. 2GiB partition formats fine in just a few seconds.
   2. Big partition appears to work at first (HDD access light flickers as usual), but then something happens. HDD access light begins blinking regularly, and after about a minute the computer locks up hard.

Initially, I hit this with one drive and naturally thought it had failed. I tried with several other units, however, and swapped the drives between identical computers, also swapped them into different models, with the same result for four different SSDs. My script has not changed, and I verified that it still works on other hardware (using Crucial SSD in Lenovo W530).

I have run SSD Toolbox on three of these drives. Quick check shows both life expectancy bars at 100%, SMART shows no errors or warnings, and a long diagnostic turns up no problems. These drives have been in use for over two years, and most of them have about 4 TiB written according to SSD Toolbox.

I just tested with a SSD that had been through a detailed diagnostic with SSD Toolbox; I created partitions using the Windows Disk Manager, and formatted them just fine. I put it back into a machine and attempted to format using my script. Machine locked up.

At this point I am stumped.

Where would we go from here?

[CHudk · Accepted solution]

After a long time, I have been able to resolve this issue. A recent test using the latest version of Windows PE (the one that ships with Windows 10) shows that it is capable of formatting the SSD without freezing the system. I do not know what Microsoft changed between Windows PE 5.0 and 10.0.10586, but it seems they have fixed the storage subsystem so that it can now do this correctly.

Therefore, the solution to this issue seems to be: Don't use WinPE 5.0; instead use Windows 8.1 or higher, or WinPE 10.x.