m17xR2 and a new SSD...meh.

Just wanted to give a mini review of my first month using a SSD for the first time.

I have a Gskill Pro using a SandForce 1200 controller. Performance is great all around and I get reasonable benches. Before this I was solely on a Segate Momentus XT. I'd say the performance boost moving from a hybrid to a SSD is the same I experienced moving from a HDD to a hybrid.

But it is not all sunny roses. The system is way more unstable now. Before nothing would crash and no BSODs (blue screen of death).

Now, daily, at least one program fails. It seems to be irrespective of what size it is or what memory it uses. A BSOD came from running a game for the first time. And 20 percent of the time, when i first boot up, it wont finish booting for MINUTES (normally it is the fast 10 sec).

No visible data corruption (yet; knock on wood), but these stability problems do annoy me to no end.

Did anyone else face similar issues?

 

did you use AS SSD to see if your new SSD is alighned correctly ?

 

i do face random but very few bootup lockups where the system fresh from cold boot would just hang in desktop while attempting to load the system tray items. i find that disabling 32-bit IO transfer in BIOS for both my drives solve this problem. No BSOD from normal operation other than sleep wake-up (not immediately, but after a while) with driver 10.11, which i suspect is due to my high overclocks anyway.

what u could do is try updating your intel RST driver to something other than the one supported by dell. im using RST v10 WHQL now.

 

@Alexnvidia

Thanks for the tips. I'll check my Intel drivers tonight, but I think I already have the latest versions of those. Got it off the Intel site, not dells (forgot to mention I DID update that one ).

I guess the cold boot lockups are normal then. I just hope it doesn't happen more often than it does now. And I need to check for that 32bit IO setting in the BIOS. I never recognized that before.

@Spiderman - can you elaborate or link to this SDD alignment procedure, and what I am looking for? Thanks guys!

 

rsgeiger, the one u get from intel's site now is essentially the same as the one dell's supporting, which is v9.6. u need to look to other channels to get the WHQL version 10 of RST.

 

download AS SSD from here Alex Intelligent Software - Downloads: AS SSD Benchmark and run it. you will see OK in green or BAD in red

 

AS Bench is all green, gives a overall score of 388. Also found the new intel drivers. Will update this thread after I've updated everything and given it a few days trial.

 

This is where you see that drive is aligned correctly

 

Yep, I get an ok for that area too

 

did you do a clean install or backup and clone. Have you verified you are on the latest firmware for your drive and the latest bios update. You can try removing intel drivers and run on stock microsoft drivers. Are you setup in AHCI in bios as well

 

Hi faiz,

0. Yes, this is a brand new install.
1. Yes, I'm in AHCI mode.
2. I'm using the latest Intel 10.04 drivers now. I still had some crashes.
3. Firmware and bios are up to date both on the drive and my laptop.
4. I have not tried stock Microsoft drivers as of yet. Since this is a SSD I figured some extra chipset support would be good.

I have recently doubled my fixed pagefile size to 16gb, rechecked the RAM, and removed some other drivers. We'll see if this helps. Otherwise, I could have a driver with some faulty memory on it.

 

Nope, i can still get it to crash if I have a few hours of intensive hard disk activity. So it really must be with the SSD controller. At this point I just dont know what I would like more - the Momentus XT or using a SSD. In all honesty, I know we need better storage technologies, but for me flash is just not nor never can be the answer. O where art thou, holographic ram?

 

What were your benchs in XT vs SSD?