Judas

I'm wondering if another sub forum should be made specifically for Solid State drives now that they have become more affordable and actually for enthusiasts ... a defactor standard.

Just a thought.


Anywho on with the question i've got.

Recently i purchased a OCZ Vertex 3 120gb.... essentially my first Solid state drive ever, and i've hit a really annoying snag that doesn't seem to have been an issue for anyone since 2009 or a few select people in early 2010.... Those in 2009 were mostly firmware/driver issues, but 2010 is the one that doesn't sit well with me, as most of those cases state that the drive is faulty.

What happens is that i get frequent and annoying "pauses". For example browsing the internet or doing something on youtube like watching a video... or just general computer use... the system will stop responding.. sometimes for a few seconds or as much as a minute or more. Mouse continues to work, but trying to lets say open task manager, or open computer or access a drive.... it takes ages, i'll even get video overlay delays, where part of one windows will be merged partially with another.

usually when i see this kind of issue i think bad ram or bad hardrive. Like it's crashing.

Now when i first setup the SSD for the first time shortly after getting windows install, i had a BSOD after essentially the same thing happened, but haven't had a BSOD since.. just some program crashes which is starting to get annoying. The only thing i've changed however is the SSD. Aside from that i've enabled the Marvell SATA III 6gbps controller to put the SSD on as it appears to perform about 40MB/s faster then the intel ICH10R.

Still for SATA III 6gbps, i think a maximum 303mb/s read speed BRAND NEW out of the box seems really slow compared to the speeds i'm seeing from others. I get 260MB/s reads on the intel ICH10R.

I'm thinking of trying out the intel controller again, but i had a hardlock with the drive plugged into it as well before doing a wipe and install.

When i got the drive, the first thing i did is use a machine already loaded with windows, stick the drive in it, boot up, not load or partition it at all, and run the ocz firmware update tool on it.. i beleive it's 2.09a since wenesday of last week when i got it. (haven't checked for another update yet though).. it was preloaded with 2.06.

After that, i plugged it into the sata II ICH10R on my main rig which i know is plenty fast and ran a few initial hardrive tests, to see what my speed was like. Considering that on hardware heaven i was seeing repeated 500+ MB/s sustained for throughput, i figured on the ICH10R that i would see a pretty significant drop in performance, but i didn't figure it would be more then 100mb/s give or take, down to say 400 or 350MB on the ICH10R considering that with RAID 0 on 6 hardrives has produce WELL over 500MB/s sustained on the same/older intel SATA II 3gbps controller. It locked up the machine once while booting into windows with the drive plugged in.....

After seeing that i was a little confused, but figured i'd go ahead and enable the marvel controller as it's SATA 6gbps, plug in the asus supplied 6gbps cable and let it rip and see how it performed..... Yet again relatively slow speeds, 300mb/s.....

Seems i'm running at half the total speed.

Now i know ocz does some quality control and likely tests the drive, when i first plugged it in to do the update, i checked the saved data info on it and it stated that it had several hours of run time already, and over 20gb of data written even though the drive appeared clean (no mbr/partition or anything). It also showed a number of errors including several FAILED start errors. When i saw this i thought wtf, if this was tested by QA, would this pass.. or is this normal?

Now i posted a windows score for it.. 7.9..... which seems excessively high for a single SSD, considering others with either the same or similare.. and even faster systems with remotely similare hardrives can't touch that, hell they can't touch 7.5 sometimes.... so i've my theories on how windows does it's checks but i'm not sure.

Playing games i run into the same pause.. if it's an MMO... and the pause is long enough, when things catch up i'm usually disconnected.

Another thing i noticed is that although i'm running an intel i7 930 with 12gb of DDR3 1600mhz (3x4gb)...... IF i happen to have the task manager open when the system pauses, the CPU usage takes a jump to 10-15% and stays there until the pause passes at which point it falls back to about 0-3%.

This happens the most frequently when i am browsing the internet and have several tabs open. Even internet explorer will recognize that the webpage has stopped responding but gets stuck saying this, shortly after it'll return after the pause completes. It's really odd. I can't tell if there is drive activity the HD light doesn't appear to be doing anything.

If i didn't know for certain, it's very similare to that of a broken connection. Such as a internet connection that is momentarily lost for a split second, and how long it takes for it to re-establish and start working again.

That pause is about the same too depending on the sevearity of the loss.

I've tried changing the cable just to be sure..

I'm considering swapping back to the ICH10R... but i'm fairly certain the same results will occur, still worth a try (not sure if windows will like me moving to the other as the main OS and whatnot is on the SSD of course)

I guess i'm just looking for opinions from anyone willing to take a stab at it.

And like i said.. the various things i've searched out related to this issue... in 2009 was thought to be a firmware/driver issue later resolved, in 2010, most of them said RMA the drive right away.

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gaetan

Well, I wish I knew how to help, but it is intriguing and I'd like to know what the heck is going on with this drive.

Sorry I can't help, hope this gets solved and I'll be following the thread, hope I can learn as well from this strange error, to say the least.

Good luck

Veridian3

First thing I would say is you will never get more than 300mb/s on the ICH10R with a single drive. It will most likely top out at 290ish. Thats the limitation of the controller.

For the Marvell it will almost without doubt use a PCIe 1x connection internally and that is possibly shared with other hardware too (depending on the ASUS design) which limits the performance of SATA 3 drives significantly, though you should still see over 300MB/s which it seems you are. (This wasnt an issue until drive started exceeding what the Marvell controller was capable of)

Finally for the pauses, the firmware on the drive could be to blame. There are known issues with Vertex 3 drives but I was under the impression 2.09 fixed this. (Would have to read about it). What I would say is that you should make sure you have the latest firmware applied to the Marvell controller (DOS based flash on ASUS boards) before you go any further as that could resolve the problem...

EDIT: Also make sure you have the latest Marvell drivers installed after that flash and go with AHCI.

EZero

This is absolutely correct.

This is also still correct, they still haven't managed to fix issues yet, it's feeling more like a trial and error.

If you want to join in the fun you can head over to Vertex3, Agility3, Solid3 support and discussion forum and read pages upon pages of people having stuttering/BSODs.

Veridian3

Thanks EZero... kind of on topic but I did note in the Force GT review (Uses the same controller as the V3/A3) that it didnt have the stutters that OCZ did... which is interesting.

Corsair are generally running a completely different (and often older) firmware than OCZ but to be fair, rarely do their drives have stability issues (in my experience).

Judas

I've done as much as i can to update the marvel controller and although marvel themselves don't provide drivers.... asus's latest supplied driver is also in use..

I'm very picky on my drivers and installation methods..

one thing i made sure of is when installing for the first time, i installed both the ICH10R Latest ACHI driver which was recently released provided by intel for rapid storage controllers.... followed by the Marvell ACHI driver.

As i stated, 303MB/s max on the marvel and 260MB/s MAX on the ICH10R

I'm curious to know if the Latest Sandybridge ICH10R with SATA 6gbps ports improve that significantly or not.

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Veridian3

The latest Marvell drivers can always be found here: Marvell drivers (Last section on the page).

As for the SB motherboards, thats what we use for the vast majority of our SSD tests so yes you will get full speed. One review recently we used the 990FX which also gives 500+ mb/s and of course any mobo test you see here always covers SATA speed.

EZero

I believe in Corsair products too but even they have had issues with the new sandforce controllers. Check this out Corsair recalls its 120GB Force 3 SSD due to 'stability issues' -- Engadget

Judas

Nice.. thanks... no wonder i was having troubles tracking down a proper driver... i usually try to avoid sites that don't look legitimate.. and since all those spawns of satan dubbed file sites that have millions of user uploaded files that i've seen loaded with viruses..... it's even harder.

I'll plug in the newer driver.. i think the one i have is almost a year older or more... so hopefully this gets rid of the annoying crash/stutter/pauses.

I'm considering moving to a newer motherboard.. but i would love to stick with my intel i7 1366 socket board with triple channel ram... I just really don't want to move to 1155 .....

would prefer to move to the 2011 socket.... but that's a year away at least i think.

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EZero

You can always see how AMD's Bulldozer CPUs pan out. Unless you plan on sticking with Intel.

Tipstaff

Don't take this the wrong way, but Judas, you weren't following the many SSD threads going on right now, were you? These things have been discussed at length in other threads, but to make things simple:

1) If you are using Windows 7 SP1, use Microsofts AHCI driver for the Marvell controller for 2 reasons: 1) the Microsoft driver is faster, and 2) the Microsoft driver supports TRIM (the Marvell ones do not).

2) Marvell 9128 controllers on most boards are running at PCIe 1x.

3) If using the Marvell controller you MUST use the SATA3 cable provided by the board manufacturer, or any compatible SATA3 cable. DO NOT use SATA2 cable. If you do use SATA2 cable, after a while you will start to see BSODs, data corruption, slow speeds, or drive corruption. Thankfully you are already doing so. One thing I don't recommend is using the SATA3 cables when plugging the drive into the SATA2 ports. I recall having trouble with my WD Black SATA3 drive when I did this, crashing and what not, and decided to run it on the Marvell controller instead.

4) Be sure to use the latest Intel RST driver (ver. 10.5). One key thing is that OCZ's Toolbox utility now works with Intel's RST driver if you are using 10.5.

5) If you use the Intel ICH do not run the Marvell controller in anything other than IDE or AHCI. If you run this set to RAID you are asking for a world of hurt.

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Judas

Tried this and got actually pretty terrible results (after i had tried it with the updated driver... 1002 version the newest one out via V3's post is 1003 so i wasn't all that out of date)

It's quite retarded that the marvell driver 1003 doesn't support trim if that's indeed the case...

Yeah, why would they invest in a 6gbps SATA III controller then limit to SATA II's maximum potential..... sounds totally ass backwards....

Good to know, although i've always stuck to things like that, using matching cables and connectors... i noticed that the SATA III cables were completely different (excluding the connector ends) compared to the SATAI/SATAII cables...

The latest Intel RST driver is 10.6 actually, and indeed i'm using it, last night i updated to the 1003 marvell controller driver.... and downloaded the required firmware updates for the controller, but apparently the firmware doesn't agree with the controllers "ID" or something. So it won't let me do an update to the marvell bios. Course the firmware package on the website V3 gave didn't explain procedures very well at all.

Actually the Marvell Controller doesn't give me the option in the motherboard bios to select RAID ... only IDE (default) or AHCI... I wasn't planning on running it in raid anyways.. but past history experiences have always proved that the 3rd party onboard alternative controllers generally don't always play well for anything. I disable most of those components even on my customers computers, no need for overly redundant number of SATA ports or an IDE port that's never going to be used.

I've been reading up thoroughly on the internet related to SSD for the past 3 years... but it's hard to cover it all and determine what is normal expect Solid State Drive Quirks and such until you actually have a full blown drive of your own that your going to be using for a good length of time and experienceing the overall effects of it. Both good and bad.

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Judas

meh the new driver didn't fix anything at all..

still looking at other options...

I think i may just switch it to the ICH10R and stick to it... i just hope that windows doesn't have a shit conniption.

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Judas

been playing around with various options out of curiosity.....

i did the TRIM check with the new marvel drivers and it showed according to the admin CMD prompt command i got, that trim is enabled.... but the irritatingly frequent freezes and crap were just getting out of hand...

I reverted to the orginal windows 7 marvel driver at which point BSODs started occuring...

So i switched the drive to the ICH10R ... swapped the cable from SATA III calbe to SATA II in the process of doing so.

i then proceeded with disabling the marvel controller in the bios.... and with AHCI mode on the intel ich10r ..... proceeded to load windows.

I noticed a return of speed on bootup almost emediately, because i had noticed in the last week or so that the startup time using the marvel controller was getting poorer...

I'm not sure why but i had to reinstall the Intel ICH10R 10.6.0.1002 Driver and rapid storage controller software....

After which a reboot and everything up and running.. so for not stutters or lag.... my windows 7 experience index is still pegged at 7.9...

benchmarks show the drop from 300MB/s to 250ish... with indentical latencies...

After getting up and running i let the computer remain running all night so that trim can do it's thing fully when it triggered if it triggered.

By the next morning things were back being snappy and such..

also windows 7 now doesn't show the drive as a defragable drive which clearly indicates it's being properly recognized..

As i said... there doesn't appear to be stuttering/stalling/freezing/lagging occuring... but i haven't been running it long enough.. it appears to be olright.

I may switch the ICH10R from AHCI to RAID mode and run the drives as JBOD and see if anything changes....

I was reading that the intel controller sometimes uses a specific lower performance mode while in AHCI mode... while in IDE mode it's basically pure backward capability IDE mode for older OSes... and RAID mode enables FULL speed and full feature sets and options (it's like performance mode)... with standard drives i've usually found this to be relatively true for my experiences with the intel controllers.

I also learnt that using the SSD as a OS drive and for primary games (such as my recent game being dragon age) that you DO NOT under any circumstances move the User "document" files to a standard hardrive.

As i'm running the Solid state with Primary partition C: and secondary partition D... C of course with the OS and program files, and D with the primary games.... i typically use the other standard hardrive which is a caviar black 640gb 64mb cache drive, with 2 partitions as well... I have the second partition of the drive as being where all my downloads/music/pictures/video/etc go including documents folder.

I learnt that this is a bad idea while playing some games or doing certain things as the "documents" folder will enevitably be accessed several times, specially if your playing games such as dragon age which store some of it's game profile/settings and saves in this folder. While it's not a huge problem, it is a little annoying and lengthy process if your say playing a game and go to load/save and have to sit and wait for the hardrive to wake up quite often.

So i moved the documents folder back to the Solid state drive and now experience no issues related to the 2nd hardrive sleeping.

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Judas

I'm still getting random BSODs... usually occuring shortly after starting windows... but sometimes after doing the simpliest things..

For example.... BSOD occured emediately after i "saved" a game within the game... and when it rebooted, that saved game state was not there.

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kris23

i have received the twin Corsair Force 3 60GB drives i have ordered recently....

i initially set them up in RAID 0, during the day or so that they were running, they were almost flawless... I had the latest RST drivers installed and both drives were on SATA III ports with SATA III cables.

i didnt have any sort of hanging or BSODs to report... that was until the failure of drive 1

It barely lasted a day, i restarted the system and it was shown that drive one had errors and i took the array down.

I tested each drive, couldnt even get an OS onto drive 1 and now im using only one drive, the other good one and am having problems with the OS hanging constantly...

I have had the system setup in AHCI and have had horrible problems with the system just stalling.

I got two 60GB drives mainly because i heard there were numerous problems relating to BSODs and general instability with both OCZs sandforce 120GB models and Corsairs 120GB models...

I heard nothing about the 60GB versions so i thought i should just give them a try.

setting up the system in RAID with the single drive seems to be less of a problem, but there still is a fair bit of stalling with the single drive.

I really do not like how this is looking, the problem with the system hangs is completely unacceptable when doing intensive things because if i play a game, im stuck and unable to do ANYTHING to the computer for several minutes.

I will probably return one if not both of the drives for replacements, but i do hope that the one i am currently using is still good. It was running fairly well in RAID 0...

First experience with SSDs, not a very good one.

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Tyrsonswood

I've got two RAID 0 arrays using 60gb drives running here flawlessly (Two different systems, and different brands in each system.) Difference being I'm running SATA II..... These problems look to be SATA III related.

I've got a third system with a 30gb single, initially I had a bad cable, ran fine but SMART took a few hits..... Other than that it's also running fine. So far, so good with SSD's.



EDIT: also note these are AMD systems........ You guys are running Intel, no?

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kris23

jeez... does this mean that SATA III is just not ready for prime-time yet?

if i can do something about this system hanging, it would be perfect...

i just hate the idea of using SATA III drives only to have them run at SATA II speeds...

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Tyrsonswood

I would agree, but I wonder if the problem goes away at SATA II speeds....... Just as an experiment.

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kris23

so im running RAID, i installed then uninstalled Intel RST... so far no issues...

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Tipstaff

I've had nothing but issues with Corsair Force drives these last couple months with clients machines, specifically the Force F115's on current Intel hardware (especially Intel branded boards). BSOD, crashing, reboots, SSD disappearing during a cold boot and even a reboot. My personal F115 is just fine, as is my Agility 2, and even my Agility 3 on all the hardware I've tested. I've seen people having the same issue with all sorts of hardware and SSD combos, including the same stuff I have, RAID, single drive on a RAID array, AHCI, SATAII, SATAIII, plus the gambit of different software and drivers (such as Intel RST 9.6 to 10.6), but nobody seems to have found a consistent setup.

Right now the only drive I trust to work, 100%, is the Kingston SSDNow V100 SV100S2 (specifically the 64GZ and 128GZ). So far these have been really solid on all the machines I've built with them.

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kris23

I have come to the conclusion that i may need to ditch the sandforce based SSDs in order to have a 100% trouble-free system...

the SSD i am using now pretty much stopped being detected by the motherboard earlier and needed to be unplugged and plugged back in for it to work properly...

so far it appears to be some sort of hardware incompatibility with the intel SATA III if this is how they perform on an intel platform...

i saw some reviews on newegg that showed rather good results on AMD systems, i wouldnt give them much weight but this does look like the drive has problems with intel SATA III in particular.

I will exchange both of the Force 3 drives for new ones, hopefully i can get a working system together with these.

If they still do not work out properly with working drives, i will probably change to Crucial M4 64GB drives.

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Judas

as i've stated.. it's not limited to SATA III..

my intel ICH10R is a SATA II only... and even though the agility 3 is SATA III.... it's still relatively random.

what's beyond odd to me is... this relatively common pattern of the BSOD... even though the time delay is random for the most part.... i recently recognized this pattern.

I'll boot up the computer.... it'll get into windows.. and provided i Don't do a damn thing not even touch the mouse.. the machine will load.. wait about 2 minutes.... and then proceed to a hard lock and BSOD, i've nothing setup to run or anything at any time so i know that's not it.. worst part is that while windows recognized there was a problem.. it can't pull any error report information as it appears to fail to write the information to the drive. Just that shutdown was improper that is all...

anyways.... after the BSOD and auto reboot... system loads.. and runs without problems for hours and hours.. no delays.. no hangs or stalls of any kind... and loads damn fast anything i want.

Shut down the system at night... start it up the next day for the same thing.... gets into windows.. BSODs..... restarts and is fine.

It's pretty damn bizarre...

Now if i sit and use the machine EMEDIATELY on the fresh boot of the day..... i can go a few minutes to about an hour before it'll BSOD...

temperature has no revelance.... nothing seems wrong....

i'm going to attempt to swap ram to something else again... i had issues with Corsair ram in this asus board.... and i think i'm having issues with the patriot possibily.... think i'll jump back to the G.Skill as they just seemed to work flawlessly with even tighter timings.

I'm kinda at a loss of what is the problem.

And i'm still thinking that when i first got the drive and the first thing i did was run the ocz toolbox to update the firmware.. the first thing i did was check the disk activity/status/report history.. and noticed that even before a single partition was created on the drive.... it reported almost 100 errors and 20+ gb of data written to it and so many hours of use... the drive was sealed in the OCZ labeled sealed box and no indiction of refurb or anything... and i'm still curious to know if this is common.

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kris23

the BSODs im sure are limited to the 120GB versions of the sandforce based drives, its been noted with the Vertex 3s and seems to be even worse off for the Corsair Force 3s...

I have not had a BSOD problem at all with the working drive, but i do have the frequent hanging problem that seems to be directly related to the SATA III controller.

If OCZs latest firmware doesnt do it, i suggest trying a different size if possible, it may just work...

since all the drives more or less use the same firmware issued by sandforce fashoned in different ways, it could just be that the particular model is bugged.

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gaetan

My brain is literally overloading with technical information

Judas

I was looking into this earlier.. and it seems to be relatively inaccurate, as there are basically identical reports for the smaller and larger drives, it just seems that the majority of sold drives for these newer ones are the 120gb versions, which would obviously explain why it seems "more" common. More users, more people having issues....

It's just bloody frustrating..

Yesterday i had a 0 error day.... completed a 350,000 file 70-90gb Full virus scan in less than 10 minutes (which is pretty huge speed compared to the near 1 hour and 20 minutes scan on a set of raid 0'd 640gb WD caviar black SATA III)

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kris23

if that is the case, then it could be that the sandforce controller just does not agree with the onboard SATA controller... or vice-versa... Sounds pretty bad really...

right now i am packing both drives up and getting them ready to send back to newegg for a new pair. if these next ones dont prove fully functional in RAID 0 then im going to see about getting a different set of drives.

most likely not a sandforce SATA III based one.

it seems that AMD users have been having far less problems with the drives according to OCZ staff so it may just be a problem mostly on intel/marvell side of things.

If it turns out to be a problem with the Intel controller, i would probably begin making plans to jump platforms...

if you have any recent Phenom II based system, would you mind trying it on that to see if you still have the same problems? I will probably try this as well if my problems aren't 100% fixed.

it would be pretty interesting to find that the SATA III controller is unable to handle the high I/O speeds or some other parameter of the SSD as the reason for the system hangs and BSODs..

But that still doesnt explain your BSODs while running in SATA II mode, but like i said, i haven't had a BSOD with my 60GB drives since the RAID array went down so it could still be an issue with that model only as i'm certain that each size requires a different firmware. I also do not feel like messing with the drives until i get two working ones.

I really hope these problems are only limited to drivers and firmware... it would be horrible to see that the drives aren't performing to spec because of the controller on the motherboard on top of their little issues....

When i get the drives back, i will test them in single drive mode on SATA II to see if i get the same problems. if i do, then you may want to try a different SSD with a non sandforce based controller. If i don't, then maybe a different size may fix the problem...

This has been quite a bit of frustration for me as well...

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Judas

well prior to moving back to the sata II and prior to updating the marvel drivers to the latest..... i wasn't getting BSODs really just really terrible stuttering and hangs that were random in length...

Also you should take notice that currently it appears NO controller available today supports TRIM with a RAID array of Solid state drives in any raid array mode be it 0/1/0+1/5/10

However TRIM is supported if the solid state drive is on a raid controller so long as it's not part of a raid array/mode and remains as an independant drive.

i was looking at some stats the other day and saw how 2 fast drives were working and producing initially much better results.. but because you can't even run trim manually using any toolbox, the read/write performance degraded quickly to that of some stating worse results than a frequently trimmed single drive.

This is why i didn't purchase 2x 60gb SSDs... specially considering that a single SSD is currently overwhelming the controller i'm using and it shows evidence that that even on the new intel or other onboard controllers. that a single vertex 3 SSD or intel C510/510C is only about 15% from flooding the controller.. so raid 0ing them only granted a 15% maximum boost due to this fact.

Only way around this is to have a dedicated and rather costly PCI-ex RAID card with it's own unique powerful controller and i think they require pci-ex 4x mode.

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kris23

if i remember right, with the Intel SATA III, before my array came crashing down, i checked for TRIM support via the CMD prompt...

"fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify"

i got a zero... so aside from the potential problems with the OS, it should have TRIM enabled.

I'll go back to it and check once i get it back up and running...

Im sure the intel RST allowed for TRIM support in RAID for the last couple driver versions...

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Judas

ah.... check that again.. even though that the command line states 0... apparently it's unable to complete the trim run due to the raid 0 array status..... Essentially windows 7 "knows" they are SSDs and knows to NOT defrag them, and thinks it should be able to do trim, however even with the 10.6 RST drivers, is still unable to do it due to the very nature of how Raid arrays work and how they format the drives in a certain way.

It was stated inaccurately by intel on their website at one point that SSD Trim support was available for raid arrays...... they later issued a revision to that statement and a note that corrected that statement that SSD trim support was working while the controller was in RAID mode.. but provided that the SSD was not part of an actual raid array/mode and remained as an independant drive.

Intel's support and download center and such is currently experiencing lag and full blown issues recently.. so a direct link to the intel statement isn't available.. but at least Google cache has a portion of it

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology — Is there TRIM support for RAID configurations?

Like i said... Trim supported on a raid controller with raid enabled.. provided that the SSD is not part of an actual raid array/volume/mode, further links which are unfortunately dead at this moment point to the 10.5 and 10.6 drivers still unable to support raid beyond just as i stated above.

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