What the hell is wrong with my M4?

Bought a new Crucial M4 512gb off eBay because it's recommended, along with the Samsung 830, as one of the best SSDs on the market (plus it was at a great price). SSDLife confirms the drive was brand new, with 100% life remaining and less than 1 hour of use. However, I have a consistent problem with my laptop (Lenovo Y470, in my sig) failing to properly resume from sleep with the drive installed. Every time I put it to sleep and wake it, I will be able to move the mouse, but I cannot interact with the screen/start menu at all. Keyboard is nonresponsive, cannot open task manager. I have to hard power-off the machine and reboot, at which point it works perfectly, until I put it to sleep, when it crashes in the same way.

I dropped my old Vertex Plus back in, and have encountered no problems, so I know it's the SSD causing this. I've heard tales of woe (which I thought were limited to SandForce drives) of SSDs being plain incompatible with people's hardware which no number of RMAs can fix. Has anyone encountered a similar problem with this drive, and what have you done to fix it?

 

Didn't encounter that problem with any of my M4s. I think Josea might have run into sleep issues with one of his SSD which wasn't SandForce. Have you tried disabling drive sleep in the power management option.

Oh, other quick question, drive firmware up to date (000F).

 

RMA the drive back to Crucial. I've never had sleep issues with the Intel SSDs I've bought nor the few Samsungs I've owned.

 

It should be noted as well that the HDD activity light remains off for as long as I leave the laptop frozen after I wake it from sleep, so it's clearly not responding.

I'll try updating the firmware and if that doesn't work or it's already on the latest, back to Crucial it goes. Quite frustrating when a brand new product does not work as expected

EDIT: And back it goes for RMA. Ran the firmware updater which says "there are no SSDs in your system that need to be updated." I'm assuming that means I'm already on the latest version. Come to think of it, I've had it freeze up once before when I left the computer idle for a long period of time. This is the first time I've actually put it to sleep, but I do have power management set to turn off the drives after 2 mins of inactivity. It probably powered down at that time and couldn't power back up, either.

 

Well, that is indeed strange, i have two laptops with drives set to turn off after 15 mins and a desktop with drive turn off disabled. Sleep works perfectly fine on all of those. All are running or ran M4s at some point.

 

I've been sitting here doing sleep/wake cycles with my Vertex Plus back in the same laptop, and no issues. I seriously hope this is a fluke and not some sort of Sandforce-esque compatibility problem that can't be fixed. Other than in this laptop, I have absolutely no use/need for a 512gb SSD

One other thing I could try before I send it back is to downgrade the firmware. Is this possible, and how would I go about doing it? Is it as simple as just downloading the "updater" for whichever firmware I choose to use, and overwriting the newer one? I found a topic on a mac forum about users having problems with sleep but only after they updated to 000F, which based on the label appears to be what this drive shipped with. What's the lowest firmware I can go to without having the 42000 hours (or whatever length of time it was) bug?

 

0309 was the fix for the 5000h bug.

 

Problem solved, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the SSD. After swapping drives a couple times trying to figure out exactly what was wrong, the laptop began BSODing or shutting down when I held it at an angle, or pinched the front. Since my warranty has long been voided by replacing the CPU, I took it apart and noticed a small connector near the HDD bay was nearly all the way out of its socket. I put it back, no more BSODs, and no more SSD/sleep problems. I must have knocked it loose installing the M4.

If this had been partially loose for some time, this might have been the cause of random crashes I had been attributing to bad RAM as well.

EDIT: Correction, the random crashes and BSODs are gone, but the drive still will not wake from sleep. I will try downgrading the firmware and, failing that, RMA the drive.

 

I personally wouldn't downgrade given the stern warning at Crucial.com Product Downloads - Firmware Updates.

By any chance is the hard drive light stuck on when in the bad state and do you have "Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period in your event log?

I had to apply registry LPM change to get my Samsung 830 to work properly in my Lenovo T61p (which is based on the Intel Santa Rosa chipset). See http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...age/613245-samsung-830-ssd-5.html#post8287055. If my link doesn't work, go to post 248.

I don't recall any wake up problems like you had but just had significant usability problems due to the weird pauses until I applied the change. After that, the pauses and timeouts in the event log went away.

 

I had the exact problem! Every single time that I tried to wake the ssd up from resume, it crAshes. Obviously I re-booted the pc, but the pc could not detect the ssd and gave Error 2100. I had to do a hard boot before it works again.

The solution to me was to downgrade the firmware to 0309. Tried overnight and so far my computer had not crashed yet. So, finger-crossed. I believe it is possibly a firmware issue from crucial.

 

I had a problem with getting a bsod every time i resumed from sleep with a crucial m4, latest firmware, it also happened with an Corsair F60 , I swapped the drives around a dozen times so it`s not a bad connection, I have done numerous clean installs and it still happens, so i bought a Samsung 830 256GB and i have not had a bsod since, and i must have done a few hundred sleep-resumes.

I dont know if my Samsung notebook only likes Samsung SDD?

John.