My SSD Hard Disk freezes intermittently.

I too purchased the SanDisk Extreme 120 GB SSD drive and installed this into a MacBook Pro 2008. I was able to clone over the system / data without a problem. The performance was excellent for about a week. Now Its hesitating constantly. Simple tasks like switching between programs, making windows larger…etc, besides loading programs, will internitantly seem to stall before accomplishing the task. I’m also using a sector check program and it seems to blaze through severa thousand blocks and then will stall for about 20 seconds and then continue to roll through several more blocks. So far, no bad blocks found, but there’s no question that the issue is here.  I even when back to a back-up from last week before the issue was clearly noticable and the issue is the same. So I believe software has been ruled out. I am not seeing errors in the task manager (console)…etc, that point me to any other althernative then to suspect an issue with the new hard drive. I noticed you have posted firmware updates, but they are not mac installable. Is there a way to work around this? I’d loved the initial performance, but now its worse then before when I was using a 5400 RPM drive.  Thank you.

there are downloadable ISO that can be burned to a CD for uopgrading on a MAC stickied at the top of this board. as for drive performance

how much free space does the drive have?

have you enabled TRIM?

how is performance on a freshly installed OS? 

@lewrossi, does your Macbook Pro have a nVidia graphics card in it? I have read of a lot of people with nVidia Macs having issues with Sandforce cased SSDs regardless of vendor. Seems to be an nVidia issue.

Same problem for me with latest firmware (updated to try to solve the freezing problem) on my Sandisk Extreme 120GB.

The computer freezes during about 20s (HDD led on) randomly.

My configuration:

Win 7

ASRock 880GM-LE/FX

AMD Phenom II X4 965

AMD HD 5770

AHCI is activated

No problem with my OCZ Vertex 2 60GB with the same configuration (changed to have more space…).

One last point: the boot time is slower (30s) with my Sandisk Extreme compared to the OCZ Vertex (25s) with more installed programs (older win7 installation)!

I suspect my Extreme SSD to be faulty…

Regards,

Nmut

I too am having occasional freezes.

I have upgraded from a very stable system running a Crucial C300 128G SSD to a SanDisk Extreme 240G - basically for the extra space.

After, and during, a fresh install of Windows 7 64bit I had a number of freezes where I needed to use the big red button to close the system.

If I drop back to the old Windows install on the Crucial, everything works just fine.

I have also had an interesting problem with the instalation of one of the drivers, which I will raise as a separate post.

System is…

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Rev 1
Memory - Corsair Vengeance 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz
Graphics Card - nVidia GTX 460
System Drive - SanDisk Extreme 240G - Ver R201
Storage 1T Raid 1 Array, 2T Raid 1 Array
Spare - Crucial C300 128G SSD (Currently contains old Windows system)
All in a Fractal Design R3 Case with copious airflow

BIOS, Firmware and drivers all at manufacturers latest.
NB - No overclocking

RzB

for the ones still getting intermitent freezing. have you all tried disableing HIPM? below is a link that explains how.

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

I got a SanDisk Extreme 240 Gb disk.

I have installed it in a Toshiba Portege R500 laptop, then I installed Win7 x86.

It worked with no problems since the SSD had firmware R112 installed. Since I updated the SSD firmware to R201 it started freezing as described in this thread.

I tried enabling/disabling HIPM and DIPM but it did not work.

Now I’m writing hoping that someone at Sandisk would understand that there are issues with their new firmware that make the SSD useless.

I hope that someone could tell me if there is a way to downgrade the SSD firmware to the previous R112.

Thanks

Same issue. I have a early 2008 macbook pro so I can’t turn off the power saving thingy. 

Sandisk 120GB with latest firmware (201). Problems started a few weeks after installing it and have been occuring ever since. 

I have exactly same symptom as lewrossi and BCinc and I also own MacBook Pro late 2008 model with Lion installed.

  • Here is my setting in detail
  • MacBook Pro 15" (late 2008)
  • SanDisk Extreme 120 GB with R201 Firmware 
  • 8GB RAM
  • Lion 10.7.4
  • Use Optibay for an old HDD as secondary HDD
  • Trim is ON by Trim Enabler

I also wiped out everything and removed “Recover HD” and installed Snow Leopard but it also shows occational freezes so it’s not OS issue.  

It worked greatly for 1st day, and fine with several reboots but it seems it gets worse (and symptom started) after hit “hibernate mode” (over 70 min sleep).  

Cleaning cache by Onyx, Recreating Spotlight Index, Safeboot, PRAM clear, and I tried so many tips and tricks but none worked.  

Does anyone have any clue how to avoid this freeze, or improve the performance of this SSD?  Do we have a new firmware soon?

Or, since we have 3 people with MacBook Pro 2008 models have this problem, does that something to do with Mac Hardware issue?

For those with issues on a 2008 Mac, there is a known issue of incompatibility with nVidia chipsets and Sandforce based drives. This may be the reason you are seeing this. You could try disabling sleep hard drive under power settings to see if this makes a difference - especially when you say these issues started for you after hibernation.

Thanks donka for your tip.  As of taking your advice, avoid using nVidia graphic card, my MacBook Pro late 2008 is back alive with lighting fast speed! :laughing:

This is what I did to avoid those “occasional freezes” and it does NOT even require clean install (sweet!)

  • Go to System Preferences > Energy Saver > Select “Better battery life” from the selection of [Graphics:] at the top.  This should be disabiling nVidia graphic card and using onboard GPU instead
  • Also, DO NOT Connect SECONDARY MONITOR!!  I was using mini-display port to connect Apple Cinema display as 2nd monitor.  It works ok a while, but eventually, this occasional freezes come back.  

With this settings, my MBP2008 boots within 4 gear spins and everything seems working great!  It’s been nealy 40 hours since the new settings, 4 reboots, 3 hibernations, my MBP still works great.

BTW, I still keep the setting of “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible” to trigger hibernate.  Yes, it takes about 20-30 seconds to come back from deep sleep but occational sleep does not happen with this setting.

This may or may not work for other MacBook Pro late 2008 models, but it sure fixed my issue.  I’ll look more into those secondary monitor issue if that really causes occational freezes.

Extra:  Other settings I performed

  • Disable chache for Safari 

  • Spotlight only against Mail

  • Disable “noatime” 

  • Safeboot and Verify Disk (no error) 

  • PRAM Reset (it did not fix the problem before “Better Battery life” was set)

Cool. I also disabled the hibernation file which means going to sleep or waking up is instant as the system is not writing the 8GB file (size of RAM) each time.

donka, I don’t against that idea but it will cause losing data if my MBP runs out of battery completely (and I occationally do while using it outside for visiting my clients) :cry: 

I better stick with hibernation enabled but people who is connected with power cable 24/7, it’s good idea to disable it for faster wake up and not waste size of sleepimage file which is size of RAM you have on MBP  :smiley:

Yip, it all depends on how you use your MBP. With auto save you theoretically should not lose any work if you did run out of battery power but having the extra backup of the hibernation file offers more security and peace of mind.

Extreme 120 installed in my ASUS G73JH with Win 7, freeze intermittently especially running “Create AAC version” audio in Itune and VOIP dialling. It just freeze and hang my whole system without error or blue screen. Force start to resume my system, I’ve done all your advise in the forums but problem still persist.

@drlucky wrote:

for the ones still getting intermitent freezing. have you all tried disableing HIPM? below is a link that explains how.

 

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

Tried it, no luck :frowning:

is sandisk support even reading this?

Too bad there is no such setting or icon in my system preferences. I see have two sliders ‘computer sleep’ and ‘display sleep’, however no icons. 

Also, I wonder if disabling the nVidia doesn’t affect performances? I regularly use it for editing video so I need all the power I can get. 

Another thing is the SSD started making strange sisling noises, kinda like old hard drives did after a while. 

Thanks!

Hi Guys,

I’m getting the same issue here. The system worked fine for about a week and then just started stalling for a minute at a time, then runnng ok, then stalling again. 

System details are

Win 7

Sandisk extreme 240gb ssd with firmware R201

running in IDE (will check with AHCI when i get the chance)

Gigabyte P55-US3L (rev2.0) with latest firmware

AMD 6850 Graphics card (not Nvidia as people have suggested that might cause issues)

8GB ram

Trim is enabled, defrag is disabled.

Note that the system works flawlessly off a hard disk, it’s only when booted from the SSD that there is an issue.

Hi Guys,

I’ve just tried updating the Intel SATA drivers to the latest version. It’s only been up for 20 mins since doing it, but I haven’t had a stall yet so fingers crossed

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect?iid=dc_iduu

might be worth a go?

Ok, that’s a no, still stalling. Hopefully someone from Sandisk will respond to my case, either that or I’ll send it back.