X25-M 160GB causes problems

[PRose4]

Hello everybody,

this morning I turned on my PC and up till the Windows 7 Logon Screen everything was just fine. As soon as I started typing in my passwort the system didn't respond to anything else but the movement of the mouse. I couldn't click anywhere and I couldn't see the dots/asterisks for the letters of my passwort I already typed in. The HDD activity LED was blinking rapidly so I waited a few minutes when suddenly the Logon Screen changed to "please wait". Usually logging on takes only a few seconds till I see my desktop.

I restarted the hard way and saw exact the same things happen. I then started in safe mode where the desktop loaded within the usual timeframe. I looked into the system log and saw many entries concerning "disk" and a read failure for "Harddisk0". I wanted to start the Intel SSD Toolbox but it seems as if the Toolbox can't be run in safe mode. Having no other tools at hand I decided to run the standard Windows Checkdisk. Checkdisk didn't find any errors so I concluded that there were no pure filesystem errors.

I removed my other hard disks so the system could only access the SSD to check if the error may be caused by a startup program installed on the hard disk. This didn't change anything, logging on took like forever and I again shut down using the power button because I had to leave for work.

First question: Does anybody have experience with this kind of issue?

Some details which might be necessary for helping me: My SSD is an X25-M with 160GB (Postville Refresh) from 2009. It is connected to the primary SATA-6-Port on a Gigabyte X79-UP4. The board is much younger than the SSD, only about a year old, but I didn't have any problems with it so far. I also have two magnetic hard disks in RAID-1-mode on a separate Promise TX2300 controller. My operating system is Windows 7 Professional 64bit. I can't say which chipset driver is installed at the moment because I'm at work right now, but it was the newest one available for X79 in October 2013 when I updated it the last time. I didn't have any problems after updating it back then and as I didn't change any other software (may it be driver or application) within the last week I don't think my problem is caused by software malfunction.

I also checked for virusses last week (compelete scan with Kaspersky Internet Security, the background scanner is running all the time) and did a quick check with the SSD Toolbox just a few days ago. The checked didn't return any problems and the S.M.A.R.T. values all looked pretty fine to me.

Second question: What can I do now? I'm going to connect the SSD to my girlfriends system and run the SSD Toolbox there to do a complete check. Can the Toolbox fix errors if they only affect certain "cells"? Like it marks the affected/defetive "cells" and uses some spare cells? I know this works for magnetic hard disks and as SSDs have spare area for several reasons I think this might be possible here as well. Normally I would expect this to happen in the background but for some reason this process may have failed. As the health was reported as very good and the remaining lifetime was reported as nearly full, I don't think the SSD has run out of spare cells.

I'm trying to monitor this thread closely and answer to every question as soon as possible. Many many thanks in advance to anyone reading this thread and special thanks to anybody who tries to help me by answering to this thread.

Best greetings from Brunswick, Germany,

simply mod

[Jose_H_Intel1]

Hello simplymod, it is indeed a good idea to connect the Intel® SSD as a secondary drive in a different system; then you can run the Intel® SSD Toolbox if the drive is plugged into a SATA controller.

I believe it is important to discard a software issue if the steps above do not point to the hardware. I recommend you a clean boot as the first step. Another possibilities are Windows* System Restore or a clean operating system installation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135 How to perform a clean boot in Windows

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796 Perform a clean startup to determine whether background programs are interfering with your game or program

Intel® SSDs have an overprovision of cells, so you can still use the drive's capacity even if some cells eventually die.

I see your motherboard has two SATA controllers. Please confirm which one was in use by the Intel® SSD and for how long this drive worked with this motherboard.