SSD Seemingly causing system crashes and stuttering/freezes in games in Windows 10

Legacy SanDisk Products Ultra II Internal SSD
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Hi everyone,

I had a HDD starting to fail in a refurbished MSI GS60 Ghost Pro laptop I recently purchased.  I was going to send in via warranty to have it replaced for free, but then I saw a great deal on Amazon for a Ultra II SSD 960 and decided it was worth spending a little money and just upgrading to solid state.

Of course, replacing the hard drive on my own voided the 180 day warranty on the laptop but it seemed easy enough to do and I didn’t have any issues physically replacing the drive.  

I installed it, powered on, and the computer wasn’t recognizing it. I used the disk utility or whatever it’s called to format the drive and it showed up just fine. I should say that when I bought it there were two drives in this laptop: one 128 gb SSD forthe OS and general application installs, and one 1 TB HDD for my files and general use.  The SSD is underneath the motherboard and a pain in the ass to get to, and also working perfectly fine so no reason to change out.  The HDD is what I replaced.  And really, the only thing installed to the new Sandisk SSD that replaced it is my desktop/documents/download folders, Steam and all my games.

The computer in general seems to be operating fine.  But when I load up games, they suddenly now stutter and randomly  freeze or just drop to a black screen.

I have since optimized the drive, and checked that it’s running in AHCI mode (it is) as recommended on several message boards.  The other day I got a couple system crashes while working in Premiere Pro with a large PSD file (although Premiere is installed on the system SSD, and the file was on an external HDD so this may be unrelated. The freeze happened when I was applying drop shadows to the PSD file on my time line so that may have engaged the graphics card?).

I have run the Sandisk SSD diagnostic software and it says everything is hunky dory with the drive.  So at the very least it doesn’t appear that I messed up with the physical install. I have the most current drivers installed for the Sandisk drive, as well as my graphics card.  So I’m at a loss.

System specs:

Windows 10 64-bit

Processor Intel(R) Core™ i7-5700HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz, 2701 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

16 GB Ram

Geforce GTX970m graphics card

128 GB SSD with OS and APP installs

Sandisk Ultra II 960GB SSD

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I should add that Adobe Illustrator crashes every time I open a file or start a new file.  It does say that it is operating in CMYK/GPU preview.  So again this may be a comflict with the graphics card.

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Update:

I was using an external monitor, mirroring the desktop (because for some reason even before the SSD, Premiere wouldn’t show video in either of the viewer windows with extended desktop mode).

I discovererd that if I just have one monitor (either laptop screen or external via HDMI or Display port) instead of the mirrored dektop, the stutter in games went away.  Now I must stress that this WAS NOT AN ISSUE before the SSD drive install.

I also want to mention if I didn’t before, this drive is not the OS install drive.  Just and internal drive that has games and video files, downloads/desktop folders, etc…

But I am getting crashes seemingly related to the video card, which were not happening before the SSD.

I have updated drivers for both video card and SSD.

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Hi Harrisfilms

Please contact our support center and submit event logs from there, it will be hard to troubleshoot over forum threads because this may seem to be a more complicated issue