My SSD Hard Disk freezes intermittently.

@czajunia wrote:

Just a little follow-up. After updating the firmware on both my ASUS mobo and the hard drive the situation improved a bit. I’ve noticed no freezes since yesterday and was able to run chkds on my drive which fixed some errors and didn’t freeze. Also I was able to run an HDTune test which reported some bad sectors but at least it didn’t freeze this time either.

 

There are still some problems though. I get a “read error” when trying to run HDTune speed test and it never finishes. Also, I got a similar error when backing up my system using Windows backup which terminated at the end of the process reporting some read errors.

 

Any ideas? Do you think moving the system to a different volume, formatting the Sandisk drive and them moving it back could improve the situation?

well.

I’m going to reinstall this weekend, started completely freezing on me too, AGAIN.
sigh. Using the windows on my WD 750gb drive its no problem. I need to find out if its a windows or SSD issue.

I’d recommend a reinstall instead of moving it around. Full format isn’t the way to go for flash based disks, as they dont have magnetic sectors, as far as i know, but i might be mistaken. I believe garbage collection is auto cleans the disks if you place an empty partition on the disk. (again, _not_ sure).

As you can imagine I am not an SSD expert either. :slight_smile:

I thought about moving the system back and forth simply because I still assume it’s a hard drive issue rather than Windows. Also, I don’t think formatting will fix the drive as such but my idea was that maybe when I copy the system back to the dirve the files will be written avoiding faulty memory cells if there are any. Dunno if this makes sense and whether it will work or not. I may just give it a go first as I don’t feel like re-installing all my apps. 

Any solution for this problem?

I bought a ssd extreme 240 GB and i have the same problem.

If I speak with ssd support change the ssd?

Thanks

Update: After trying everything on this forum without lasting results I turned to RMA and have very good experiences with SanDisk Tech Support. Got a brand new one that hasn’t frozen in the last week.

I have a 480GB (sdssdx480gg25) and it too is freezing intermittently. This never happened when I had a mechanical HDD in the notebook. 

Sometimes it doesn’t freeze at all for weeks, then suddenly for a day or so it freezes every 15-30 minutes. When it freezes the HDD LED lights up and stays on constantly, I can still move the mouse and interact with apps, but as soon as I launch a program or do something else that causes a data read from the SSD, Windows itself then freezes while it waits for the IO read command to complete, the mouse still moves but clicks are totally unresponsive. At this point I force the power off and reboot. Boot speed is fine and everything is great until it freezes again. Rinse and repeat.

I tried setting HIPM and DIPM to active on the current power profile, no luck.

I also tried disabling USB Selective Suspend and PCI Express sleep, no luck.

I ran CHKDSK on the volumes, no errors found.

I have the latest firmware R211.

I’m a PC technician so I know what I’m doing, I can’t think of anything else to try. 

I’ve seen other brands of SSD’s freeze like this on specific hardware but I’m not sure if they had the same controller.

Through trial and error I’m convinced it is a problem or compatibility issue with the SSD.

I will try updating the SATA driver but I doubt it would make any difference. It seems hardware/firmware related. I’ll report back if the SATA driver resolves the problem.

System:

Toshiba Qosmio F60 latest BIOS (non UEFI, SATA Mode=AHCI)

Core i7 (Calpella Series 5 chipset, SATA II)

Win8 pro (fresh install)

nVidia GeForce GT330M w/driver 136.97

Latest BSOD’s since I’ve had the SSD installed which may be related:

0x00000133 NTFS.SYS (DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION)

0x00000133 hal.dll (DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION)

0x0000009F ntoskrnl.exe (DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE)

Again, I never ran into these problems when I had the 750GB Hard Disk. Perhaps a Sandisk technician could test the SSD on one of our affected notebook models in an attempt to replicate the problem.

Update: installing the latest Intel Rapid Start driver didn’t help.

I also tried reconnecting the SATA connection thinking it may be a bad connection, no luck.

Problem solved…

The freeze happens exactly 15 minutes after Windows 8 loads, so there must be some kind of 15 minute power saving feature that is causing the problem. I’ve disabled all the power saving features I could find and even installed the iRST SATA Driver with it’s own registry setting to disable HIPM/DIPM on Physical Disk 0, still no luck.

I have Windows 7 and 8 dual boot, I’m using Windows 7 now and it is 100% stable, no more freezing :slight_smile:

hm this means your problem is completely different from mine. I am om windows 7.

My Windows 7 installation is the factory image shipped with the notebook 3 years ago, Service Pack 1 is not installed and no KB’s have been installed so there is a possibility that a KB update (for example an update supporting new SSD features/commands) may be causing the problem, which may explain why the freezing is happening in Win8 which would have all those Win7 KB’s preinstalled.

Might be a long shot but perhaps it may be worth while testing a fresh install of Win7 non-SP1 with Windows Update disabled.

Well it happened again in Windows 7, not much else I can do except sell the SSD and buy another one that doesn’t use the sandforce sf-2281 controller.

Hi,

I post in this thread to help people in solving this problem.

I say that, but I hope mines are solved.

So, this is my story:

  1. I bought a SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB

  2. I installed it in my computer and inserted Win7 DVD

  3. The SDD was not found by Win7 installation DVD

  4. I reboot on my old HDD and it was still not recognized

  5. After a few research, I found that I had to initialize and create a partition on the SSD from the disk management tool

  6. After that I retried Win7 installation on the SDD

  7. This time SSD was found but only after pressing the “refresh” (or something like that) button

  8. Installation was fine and fast

  9. After installation, Win7 didn’t want to boot.

  10. Problem was the AHCI that was not enabled in my BIOS

  11. After enabling it, it was ok

But, after that, I started to have mouse bugs. Sometimes my mouse had a wrong pointer and pointer was altered (green, red, blue).

Also I had freezes. The only solution was to reboot.

I tried to update all drivers and BIOS without success.

I finally looked on the web and I quickly saw that freezing problem is very popular.

Several methods seem helping to resolve these bugs.

I used the following way to solve my problem:

My SDD is plugged on port 0 of my motherboard (P8H61 PRO) that is managed by an ASMedia controller. So, method that consists in editing these keys doesn’t work:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port0]

I finally used the trick explained here that consists in disabling the low power operation mode (Both HIPM and DIPM):

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/177819-ahci-link-power-management-enable-hipm-dipm.html

(Refer to the end of the article in order to add “AHCI Link Power Management-HIPM/DIPM” to advanced power settings)

What I wanted to say is that this trick seems to work, at least during the last 10 hours.

Note:

A last advice for people like me that enabled AHCI after Windows installation: don’t forget to check that your Windows:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html

Finally:

I’m hope my bugs are totally solved. If it’s not the case, I will ask help from SanDisk gurus.

@+

Hi,

I post in this thread to help people in solving this problem.

I say that, but I hope mines are solved.

So, this is my story:

  1. I bought a SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB

  2. I installed it in my computer and inserted Win7 DVD

  3. The SDD was not found by Win7 installation DVD

  4. I reboot on my old HDD and it was still not recognized

  5. After a few research, I found that I had to initialize and create a partition on the SSD from the disk management tool

  6. After that I retried Win7 installation on the SDD

  7. This time SSD was found but only after pressing the “refresh” (or something like that) button

  8. Installation was fine and fast

  9. After installation, Win7 didn’t want to boot.

  10. Problem was the AHCI that was not enabled in my BIOS

  11. After enabling it, it was ok

But, after that, I started to have mouse bugs. Sometimes my mouse had a wrong pointer and pointer was altered (green, red, blue).

Also I had freezes. The only solution was to reboot.

I tried to update all drivers and BIOS without success.

I finally looked on the web and I quickly saw that freezing problem is very popular.

Several methods seem helping to resolve these bugs.

I used the following way to solve my problem:

My SDD is plugged on SATA III port 0 of my motherboard (P8H61 PRO). SATA III is managed by an ASMedia controller. So, method that consists in editing the configuration of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver through this registry key doesn’t work since my SATA controller is not an Intel one:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port0]

I finally used the trick explained here that consists in disabling the low power operation mode (Both HIPM and DIPM) from Windows power options:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/177819-ahci-link-power-management-enable-hipm-dipm.html

(Refer to the end of the article in order to add “AHCI Link Power Management-HIPM/DIPM” to advanced power settings)

What I wanted to say in this post is that this trick seems to work, at least during last 10 hours.

Note:

A last advice for people like me that enabled AHCI after Windows installation: don’t forget to check that your Windows uses AHCI:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html

Finally:

I hope my bugs are totally solved. If it’s not the case, I will ask help from SanDisk gurus.

@+

Bad news…

I just had a new freeze… and it was different than previous ones.

In fact, this time just after freezing, computer shutted down and fan ran very fastly.

(HDD (SSD) led was not set on during freeze).

So, I decided to reinstall my Windows.

During previous Windows installation, AHCi wasn’t enabled in the BIOS. During the first boot, I had a blue screen and it was not possible to boot. After research, enabling AHCI allowed to boot correctly.

Maybe my freezes come from this fact (Windows installtion without AHCI enabled)

I confirm that my freezes was not linked to the SSD.

So, the problem was not the SATA low power management (HIPM / DIPM).

Problem came from my grahpic card (Nvidia GTX 550 Ti).

I installed the last available (no beta) driver and this driver seems to be bugged (as well as older versions).

This article explain some things on last Nvidia drivers : http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/nvidia-freezes.html

Small trick for poeple that are searching why they have freezes:

 - When freeze occurs, check the HDD LED (if it stays ON, it’s probably linked to SSD)

 - Look to errors in Windows event manger  (I solved my bugs thanks to the event manager)

Have a 480G SanDisk Extreme that has started to have some problems.

First we started noticing that it would hang.

Now our RAID array kicks the drive out of the array.

smartctl shows PASSED but something is wrong with the drive.

Here’s some data from smartctl:

# smartctl --all /dev/sda smartctl 5.43 2012-06-30 r3573 [x86\_64-linux-3.7.3-101.fc17.x86\_64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-12 by Bruce Allen, [http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net](http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net)=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: SanDisk SDSSDX480GG25 Serial Number: 122458400496 LU WWN Device Id: 5 001b44 78eabe2f0 Firmware Version: R201 User Capacity: 480,103,981,056 bytes [480 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ACS-2 revision 3 Local Time is: Fri Feb 21 18:03:08 2014 EST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 0) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 48) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x0021) SCT Status supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE\_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN\_FAILED RAW\_VALUE 1 Raw\_Read\_Error\_Rate 0x000f 118 118 050 Pre-fail Always - 195123396 5 Reallocated\_Sector\_Ct 0x0033 100 100 003 Pre-fail Always - 0 9 Power\_On\_Hours 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 9716 (221 58 0) 12 Power\_Cycle\_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old\_age Always - 42 171 Unknown\_Attribute 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 0 172 Unknown\_Attribute 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 0 174 Unknown\_Attribute 0x0030 000 000 000 Old\_age Offline - 31 177 Wear\_Leveling\_Count 0x0000 000 000 000 Old\_age Offline - 0 181 Program\_Fail\_Cnt\_Total 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 0 182 Erase\_Fail\_Count\_Total 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 0 187 Reported\_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old\_age Always - 0 194 Temperature\_Celsius 0x0022 128 028 000 Old\_age Always - 128 (0 28 0 28 0) 195 Hardware\_ECC\_Recovered 0x001c 120 120 000 Old\_age Offline - 195123396 196 Reallocated\_Event\_Count 0x0033 100 100 003 Pre-fail Always - 0 201 Soft\_Read\_Error\_Rate 0x001c 120 120 000 Old\_age Offline - 195123396 204 Soft\_ECC\_Correction 0x001c 120 120 000 Old\_age Offline - 195123396 230 Head\_Amplitude 0x0013 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 100 231 Temperature\_Celsius 0x0013 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0 233 Media\_Wearout\_Indicator 0x0000 000 000 000 Old\_age Offline - 2629 234 Unknown\_Attribute 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 3580 241 Total\_LBAs\_Written 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 3580 242 Total\_LBAs\_Read 0x0032 000 000 000 Old\_age Always - 28649 SMART Error Log not supported SMART Self-test Log not supported Note: selective self-test log revision number (0) not 1 implies that no selective self-test has ever been run SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 0 Note: revision number not 1 implies that no selective self-test has ever been run SPAN MIN\_LBA MAX\_LBA CURRENT\_TEST\_STATUS 1 0 0 Not\_testing 2 0 0 Not\_testing 3 0 0 Not\_testing 4 0 0 Not\_testing 5 0 0 Not\_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

Read error rate looks high.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/987378-how-to-switch-from-ide-to-ahci-without-repairingreinstalling-windows/

Go here and do what he says. I tried for days to stop OCZ Vertex3 to quit freezing and making me wait. Searched and tried so many things that didn’t work. Including SSD Utilties.

Well when I changed the value for the below instructions \CurrentControlSet\Services\Pciide to 0 it fixed the Freezing and waiting for unfreeze to continue doing things it stopped all hesitatsions and Freezing. Was in HP DV6000 That I installed Windows 7 Pro onto standard IDE. When I cloned it I went through freezes that killed the time SSD Drive Enhanced…

No setting in HP’s Cheap Bios to set so i skipped last direction. Thank God

You start with step 1 while you are still in windows in IDE mode.

  1. Run the Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
  2. Navigate to Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
  3. Set the “Start” value to 0 (zero)
  4. Navigate to Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Pciide
  5. Set the “Start” value to 0 (zero)
  6. Shut down
  7. Start up again, but before Windows boots go into the BIOS configuration screens and change the disk mode to “AHCI”. Save the new BIOS configuration and restart so that Windows boots.

Quick question about setting AHCI. Is there a way to do this other that the registry like on a GUI perhaps?

Yes, I have also meet this problem. Feel crazy about this problem.

I was plan to replace my SSD, but was told that my SSD has been used for a while.

Thanks for sharing your opinions and I will try to fix the problem.

Hope it can work well.

Meanwhile, just happen to know a wonderful activity for portable native USB 3.0 SSD. Maybe useful to you as well.

they are giving away 256GB SSD drives to celebrate National Day of the PRC, see the link http://goo.gl/o9we1A

Wish me luck. :smileyvery-happy:

Yea the older chipsets like ich8 intel seem to have this problem, it was set to hipm default but it did freeze, so that solution has worked so far on active.

If its not already in the faq it probably should be.

@drlucky wrote:

one more thing you may want to try. There are some systems that may have compatibility issues with HIPM. By default Windows 7 has HIPM enabled. Try setting HIPM to active. Setting to active actually disables HIPM. Here is a quick link on how to. 

 

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/177819-ahci-link-power-management-enable-hipm-dipm.html

I installed an Ultra II 960 drive in my W7-64 Dell XPS-1702 laptop system… Afterward I would get an occasional Shutdown within 10-15 min of power up…  It would do this on either the embedded Intel, or NVidia display…  SATA reports as SATA III Speeds.

Yesterday I received an email  (I have Dashboard set to email me on updates) that there was a Firmware update X41310RL for my Ultra II Drive… I did the update via Dashboard, and it all worked fine (Laptop SSD configured with 4 partitions)… Note here: I just recently went from 8Gb to 16Gb of ram, after I started seeing shutdowns, also, but that did not increase or decrease the frequency of the shutdowns…

It’s only been 12 hours since the Udate… I’m hoping to see no more shutdowns…

Does anybody in the know here have information regarding Firmware Update Release Notes for Ultra II X41310RL Firmware?