kris23

thats odd.. i couldve sworn i replied to this earlier today...

anyways, yea i noticed the intel correction of the raid issue before but i didnt know what to make of it since as far as i knew, the OS had TRIM enabled after checking the CMD prompt.

But, that certainly is disappointing to see, since TRIM is needed in order to keep the SSDs operating properly in windows...

without it, the SSDs can only rely on the onboard garbage collection which often falls short.

I will probably just experiment with the SSDs for a bit, if i find the lack of TRIM to be a huge issue, i will probably just sell them and get a better one...

After seeing the performance numbers of that Revodrive 3 X2, i feel like getting one of the Revodrive 3s... exceeds my two drives, supports TRIM, has more storage and looks rather sleek... but i would end up blowing my money for monitors on the SSD...

its too new to have any issues reported on it but thats part of the thill.

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Judas

i just ran into a relatively strange thing.

I recently been trying different memory modules and sizes in the machien with the vertex drive.

initially running 12gb of ram.. dropped it down to 6gb with no change.

then dropped it down to 4gb with no change.... dropped it down to 2gb and hadn't experienced a crash... odd.... all running 1600mhz..

stuffed the 6gb back in and crashed..... dropped the frequency to 1066mhz just for shits and giggles... flawless...

installed 12gb.... 1066.. flawless (so far....)...

installed 24gb of ram 1066..... flawless (so far)...

Bumped the ram up to 1600mhz..... crashed repeatedly several reboots... (even though i know the ram is working fine no memtest errors, and prior to the OCZ drive "upgrade" there was no issues.

So initially i thought perhaps ram may be involved in some way or another... or at least the clock values set.

Because something seems to be as to quote a few people on the OCZ forums and other SSD manufacturers forums with sandforce controllers..... "panicking" the controller into a state that basically makes it stop communicating either for a short time or completely. This is why we get the "hang/lag/freeze" with either a BSOD that follows.. or finally a responce back after awhile.

Seems many of the SSD manufacturers are ripping their hair out trying to nail down a root cause...

Meanwhile i'm hearing that Intel's SSDs are appearing to work relatively fine.

Seems sandforce is a shit controller.. i was hoping that the vertex 3's would be fine. *sigh*.. was really wanting a intel SSD... but the vertex was 1/4 the price for the same size. (which still cost me well over $300)

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kris23

new drives came in the mail today...

same issues, freezing and whatnot... but that was with corsair's 1.2 firmware...

on August 5th, they released a new 1.3 firmware which seems to have fixed my problems after I flashed the drive, im doing quite a bit with the drive and haven't had a freeze with it yet.

however it still is too early to be certain so i will be doing all sorts of things to it for the duration of the day.

btw, Corsair's SSD flashing utility can be used while in windows on the boot SSD, it was a very convenient and painless process... had it done in a couple of minutes.

wish me luck!

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Tyrsonswood

Hope that works for ya!

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kris23

been installing tons of things, DLing content while playing games... still no issues, havent had any stuttering at all...

its looking very good for these drives now...

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kris23

still no problems... i think we have a winner...

anyone know of a good way to secure erase SSDs?

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kris23

yup... i have myself a winner finally...

in both single drive and RAID, these drives now run flawlessly... no issues at all

does this ATTO look right?

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Judas

i haven't gotten around to flashing my OCZ drive to the newer firmwarein hopes that my issues are resolved.

Recently with a few changes i've made.... only if i leave my computer on for roughly lets say 2 or more hours without being used while playing back a flash video or on youtube playing a playlist.. it'll fall apart with lack of inactivity..

i played dragon age yesterday for nearly 6 hours without a single hitch glitch or anything.

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gaetan

Congrats

if I may ask, how long does a pair of these SSDs in RAID last when working flawlessly?

personally with these transfer speeds I'd thought you would burn the cables

kris23

haha i am not sure really... SSDs can last a very long time, or die in 2 days...

since it seems that i do not have functioning TRIM commands, i will probably have to secure erase my drives every once in a while to maintain those speeds... something i never had to do before...

oh well, i reformat monthly anyway.

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gaetan

that sounds like fun

mkk

I have an older Corsair Force which has been nice, and was quite surprised when I couldn't do the same with the new OCZ Agility 3 that I'm running off now. For the average customer that's an unacceptable limitation.

Judas

still fighting..

I'm wondering if i just have a faulty OCZ SSD.... because i tried the drive on a newer sandybridge SATA intel ICH10R SATA III 6gbps and it produced similare results.

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kris23

I have zero problems... i put my system through practically every common usage scenario and it hasnt been powered down for the last few days, no issues whatsoever..

of course, there is the lack of trim but i already considered that going in...

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Judas

So this vertex 3 has been driving me insane....

the BSODs and freezes were just getting on my nerves and the last straw was the failure to install windows updates because of the corruption that has started to show up from i would assume the bsods and hard reboots.

In the meantime i've been playing around.. swapping ports... swapping cables..

when low and behold.. i stuck my 4th SATA cable on it... and for whatever reason..... appears to be working without a hitch for the last week or so.

I haven't had one freeze/failure.

Although dragon age 1 and 2 have crashed to what i would beleive are unrelated reasons (windows and everything keeps working just have to force the program to end)

I ran Memtest 86+ for well over 24 hours making sure all 24GB of DDR3 1600mhz was flawless. .which indeed it checked out perfectly fine with several passes completed under VERY warm conditions.

All the SATA cables i had been using were FROM motherboard packages. The SATA 3 cable when using the sata 3 controller was from the most recent Sandybridge motherboards i had been building with....

and the SATA 2 cables from the previous 1156 boards.

So i'm a bit confused and a little concerned.... if sata cables are turning out with manufacturer faults in them... it's going to make diagnosing some problems that much more difficult.. i never leave the cable out of the picture.. but it's unpleasant when the replacement cable is bad too.

Anyways... we'll see if the vertex 3 drive desides to still take a shit sometime soon to know for sure.

Until then.... it looks like i'll be reinstalling windows due to the corruption that has already taken place.

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Tipstaff

Out of curiosity, what type of cables have you tried, and what did you finally end up with? Were any of them right angled cables?

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Judas

all of them are the ones with one end being a right angle.

couldn't tell you the type aside from that they were the ones that have been coming with the Asus motherboards i've been building with.. all of the cables that come in the plastic bag from those systems don't have any brand on them aside from the bag having ASUS written on them.

red ones... black ones...

SATA 2 for the sata 2 ports..... sata 3 cables for the sata 3 (never mixing either)

Still haven't had a crash...

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Tipstaff

The reason I ask is that I had a long discussion with one of the higher level techs. Whenever you call for support everything gets logged. And I mean everything. One reoccurring "issue" being logged are complaints regarding data corruption with both fast mechanical drives (high RPM, high amount of cache) and SSDs, and time and again the number one used cable on a hard drive that has this happen are right angled cables. It's been suggested that this corruption could be due to data collision occurring at the bend, however not in all cases though. Some cables are better made then others, and those "higher quality" cables seem to be just fine. He said that in a large portion of support calls where the client switched back to a straight cable they saw a significant reduction of this issue.

So, his suggestion: right angle cables for optical drives, straight cables for hard drives (although he did mention BR drives). I've pretty much stuck with this setup ever since.

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Judas

i'll take it under heavy consideration.. i've been using all the right angle cables.. usually get 2 or more in each motherboard kit so i've used them on both the hd and rom drive.

btw, false alarm... the other day i came home and hit the power button... and then was presented with the windows repairing window.. didn't even give me a damn choice to continue loading windows....

so that was the last straw... i preceeded to fix my way back into windows..... backup what i needed.. and then i secure erased the drive, reinstalled win7 x64.... and was doing great (i unplugged the 640gb drive so i could keep my drive letters under control)..


Got windows installed fine..
Got the device drivers installed fine
Got updates installed fine

Shutdown, plugged the 640gb WD Cavair black 64mb in.
Powered up, didn't even get all the way into windows and BSOD.

Ok wtf is this?

I get through all that stuff and simply plugging in the 640gb drive set it all off?

So i tried again to make sure.. got into windows.... used it for about 5 minutes and froze solid.... dammit

cold shutdown, unplug the 640gb drive... startup and again freezes loading into windows.

This is to gauddamn random and intermittent... for a moment it appeared the 640gb drive was causing a headache..... but unplugging it resulted in no change..

what change or could possibily be effecting the drive.

The more i play around with it.. the more i think that this damn Vertex drive is 100% faulty.

But i'll grab the 2 untouched and stilled bagged Straight SATA 2 cables i've got here and plug them in and see if there is a change.

I also went ahead and unplugged the ssd... installed windows just on the 640gb drive and using it off and on (this will make updating the firmware on the SSD easier, and just testing stability cases), have had utterly no problems at all.

So as it stands..... i honestly think that even with changing the sata cables, this SSD is no damn good.

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Judas

so just another minor update..

went and yanked the right angled sata cable off the SSD... slapped in a generic SATA II 3gbps straight cable... and didn't make it into windows before it BSOD..

rebooted and made it in fine...

next day used the computer for an hour and suddenly.. bsod..

ok.. try another cable..

swapped the straight cable from the WD drive to the ocz..... still seeing BSODs..

But it still does it randomly... sometimes before windows, sometimes shortly after, sometimes while browsing the internet, sometimes when playing a game...

i think the longest I've gone is about 3 days without a BSOD.

But each of those days was relatively short time used.. under an hour of use.

I've tried each and every driver combination too..

using the MS Supplied AHCI intel driver..... intell RST driver.... ms marvel ahci driver, marvels own latest driver....

Least with the marvel controller..... i get massive lag/not responding periods instead of BSODs... but i think the not responding things takes longer to get out of each time than it does to experience the intel BSOD and just reboot.... Top it off the marvel solution i experience hangs/lags FAR FAR more frequently..... many times an hour.

Not sure if i should just mail ryder and tell him the life story of the poor little 120gb Vertex 3 that thought it could.... and see what he has to say about it.

BTW, tried the drive in a brand new SandyBridge intel ICH10R system..... and BSOD as well..... which makes me honestly think that indeed the drive is buggered.

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temeteus82

SSD and Vista... Any ideas how to get TRIM to work?

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Judas

if the tool is provided by the manufacturer... manually doing trim is the only way that i know of..

short of that is to just log off and let the computer remain idle and on over night and let the drive do it's own garbage collection to the best of it's ability.

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Tipstaff

There is, however, a problem. I don't think the TRIM/Garbage Collection tool works with the newer Sandforce controllers. In fact, I don't even think I've seen these tools support anything other than the first gen SSDs (except for Intel's own utility). For instance, OCZ's GC tool is available for their first gen drives, but not for the second or third. There is also a tool that supposedly works for all drives, but it was written to only work from within Windows 7. It's designed for those with multiboot systems where one of the other bootable OS's don't do GC (such as a Windows 7/XP dual boot system).

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Judas

yeah a lot of information is kinda vague or unknown pertaining to the garbage collection schemes and such..

actually many people have come to the conclusion that some of the BSODs are related to TRIM kicking in and causing the sandforce controllers to panic or fail...

not entirely sure what's going on ... and getting a very distinct answer is tough.

I may splurge for the larger capacity Intel SSD.... but i would prefer to wait until they launched the next gen model after the 510 series.

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