PCIe 910 400Gb stops working after recovering from sleep with Intel Rapid Start Technology

[TAhon]

I ended up having a minor problem after installing 910 series PCIe SSD. I am running Asus Z97-A, i7-4790k, 16Gb ram, EVGA GTX 970. OS is Win7 x64 running on Samsung 850 PRO series SSD drive. I also have 2 WD Black series HDD's. I have tried now with SATA in AHCI mode and in RAID mode, but I suppose those should not affect on my case as the drive is in PCIe slot. Sleep mode is turned in to Intel Rapid Start mode immediately.

Problem:

If I decide to put my computer to sleep and wake it up later, I end up having the other block of 200Gb parts of SSD showing yellow exclamation mark in device manager. If I go to browse files my explorer freezes and same happens if I open properties of the broken device in device manager, the device manager freezes.

This ends up causing the system to be impossible to shutdown or use normally. I need to hit reset to return back normal. If I let it stay on after the wake up, in some point the computer restarts by itself and gives me a note of blue screen with BSCODE 9F.

Any ideas how to proceed? I would like to use the sleep mode even that the computer start quite fast also with normal boot.

[jbenavides]

Hello tahonen,

Please disable Intel® Rapid Start Technology, then test if the issue happens in this configuration or not. This will help us discard other possibilities.

[TAhon]

Made a really quick test as some device woke up the computer right after entering sleep. So I disabled rapid start and I ended up having the same problem. Attached a picture of the problem.

[jbenavides]

Are you using the most recent firmware version for your SSD?

For the Solid-State Drive 910 Series 400 GB it should be 1200C008A424.

The Intel® Solid-State Drive 910 Series 800 GB uses 1200D006A424.

Make sure that the drive is connected using the PCIe Gen2.0/3.0 x8 slot at all times.

You can usehttps://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/21099/Intel-Solid-State-Drive-Data-Center-Tool-910-Series Intel® Solid-State Drive Data Center Tool - 910 Series to update the drive's firmware.

The Intel® SSD Data Center Tool User's Guide is part of the compressed file. The information for the firmware update is found in pages 11 and 28.

[TAhon]

I tried again with the x16_2 slot (x16_1 is for my GPU). I had the SSD in x16_3 slot earlier. Now that I put it to the number 2 slot my GPU drops to x8 mode. Now I noticed that the drive was working properly after sleep with rapid start enabled. However, this caused another problem, which I rate higher than the sleep problem. I started GTA V and the game started to be annoyingly laggy. While driving a car the picture is constantly twitching. After checking the motherboard manual I realized that the x16_3 port is only x2. I don't think that is actually the problem as it should only affect on the speed of the drive, which I still find fast enough. I tried multiple settings from bios if they had something to do with it but without any luck.

Firmware of the drive was already the latest.

[jbenavides]

Hello tahonen,

If the drive is not getting the 8 lanes (PCIe 2.0 x8), then we would not be able to guarantee it will operate properly. However, it seems that when the system uses 8 PCIe lanes for your SSD, it has to downshift your Video card (causing the video lag).

Please take into consideration that PCIe SSDs take longer to initialize and to resume from sleep and if it is not working according to its specification, then the drive may not be ready when the OS resumes, causing the volume to become unavailable.

We advise you to check with the http://www.intel.com/support/oems.htm Computer Manufacturer Support so they can let you know if your motherboard/CPU combination is able to give PCIe 2.0 x8 connectivity to the SSD, and at the same time provide the bandwith required for proper operation of your Video Card.