Odd glitches.... power issues?

I was talking to a co-worker about how I'd had so many SSDs die, and he told me that power issues can often manifest in the weirdest ways.
Now that I think about it, I've had plenty of other issues that might be power-related.
Here's the set of issues I've had:

• OCZ Vertex 2 died at just a few months old.
• Replacement Vertex 2 died five days later, when I shut down after a short brownout. Laptop kept on working perfectly, even with this 7% remaining battery. SSD kept running until I shut down, but then "woke up dead".
• OCZ Vertex 1 also died not very long after that. At least I was able to destructively revive it. ("Destructively revive"... nice wording.)
• Occasional single-frame (that's a guess) glitches to black, when on the desktop -- never in games.
• When waking from sleep, laptop seems to give secondary-bay hard drive insufficient power. It screeches, clicks, and fails to spin up... then retries and succeeds. My Spin Retry Count is 298, and Power On Hours is 420 days.

Does anyone else notice those last two issues with their 8530w, or other same-generation laptop? I'm trying to get a sense of whether that's something failing, or just a design problem. It'll also be useful to get a sense of ATI versus NVIDIA.

If I can conclude there's a motherboard issue, then I'll need to have it addressed before my warranty ends in December.

 

I have had an OCZ Agility 1 in my hard-use DV4t for about 18 months now with no issues.

I'm not surprised that you've had Vertex 2 problems. For as much hype as the Sandforce drives get for their performance, the reliability record just isn't there. The fact that their drives dynamically compress all the data written to them on the fly, and have to decompress every read, just seems like a hornet's nest of potential issues.

If you want proven stability, the controller in the Intel X25-m G2 and now the 320 series has stood the test of time. It might not have as blazing of benchmark results but it is more than fast enough in the real world, and doesn't die randomly.

 

For me, it's the sum of all those things together that makes me consider power issues. My co-worker said that power issues can cause all sorts of really crazy issues -- for example, he's seen a case where some piece of software seemed broken, but was entirely fixed by replacing a power supply.

It's not just the Vertex 2 (Sandforce) that died; the Vertex 1 (Indilinx) also just died (but was revive-able). Are those drives known to be extra-sensitive to power issues?

It's also particularly noticeable that one of those failures happened just after a short (1 second, max) brownout -- yet, a brownout should be of no concern to a laptop!

Now that I think about it, the Indilinx failure may have also been not too long after we had momentary power drop at work.

What kind of tests would people recommend to check out the possibility of power issues?

The laptop can run Borderlands or Minecraft all day just fine -- and interestingly enough, the latter seems to make the laptop much hotter.
I'd be wary of running FurMark, because it makes my VRMs (which are not cooled by the heatsink) get alarmingly hot -- way hotter than the GPU itself.
If people with ATI 8530p/w have the same blinking, but people with NVIDIA do not, then that's likely a driver bug.

If I can confirm power issues with the motherboard, then I can have HP fix it; if I can rule that out, then that's useful as well.

(If my Indilinx drive fails again, I plan to stick it in a NAS as a cache drive, and get an Intel 320 -- it has capacitors to cover power drops, and it does ATA passwords properly.)

EDIT: Also, I got the Vertex 1 when the Vertex 2 had only been on the market for 1 month, at most.

 

My stock Micron SSD 256G (actually a rebranded Crucial C300) died on the old 8740w. Windows was operating normally, without any issues, but the Disk Sanitizer tool from BIOS showed an irrecoverable error when wiping.

My advice is run the shipped UEFI diagnostic tools for the BIOS, specially the short and long DST tests. They can tell you if any error is present. But firstly, update the UEFI tools to the latest version by using HP Support Assistant or by visiting the Download support page for the 8530w.

 

with my 8530p (ATI 3650, Win7 Ent 64bit, FU617#ABD) I used three different drives sofar:

Solidata K6-64GB (Indilix barefoot, used it for 6months without problems)
Crucial C300 128GB (in use since 12months now)
Crucial m4 256Gb (only tested it for a couple of days)

@HiddenUser: Micron is the mothercompany and the brand for professional businesses, Crucial is the brand for end customers and consumer market

 

Hmm, how about the odd hard drive behavior (failed spinups)?
Do you notice any flickering with your ATI card?

 

I have still the optical DVD drive in the Multi-Bay, so no space left for a HDD.

 

Mine happens even with the HDD in the primary bay, I believe. I'm not 100% certain of that, though. So, you could refer to memory of when you did have a HDD there.

 

oh, my 8530p was working without any HDD problems, when I still had the original Seageate 250GB Momentus 7200.3 in use

no other glitches either.

 

Interesting: after running a few days without my battery in at all, all of those glitches are gone. So, they really were power issues -- caused by the dying battery!
I'm guessing that the solid-state drives must be extra-picky about power.
For now, the best thing to do is to just get a new battery.

 

Although I'm Dell user, I used 7200rpm Seagate Momentus 7200.4 in USB external case -Spin Retry Count was also high (probably low power on USB ports). When transferring large files sometimes HDD disappeared! All stopped when I put it in MediaBay HDD (NewModeus) case. It fit in just with hair gap but it fits. (9,5mm , 7mm fits without issues). Im using 80GB X25-m in "main HDD bay" for 18 months now, 12 months in regular PC, rest in laptop. Seems fine, and probably Intel drives are more resilient to power changes (many occasions of disconnecting laptop from PS and reconnecting, also almost dead battery in my laptop 15% charge).

 

So does the mechanical HDD still make the odd noises during spiun-up? That is very weird. Weird that the battery was causing these issues, did you not have it plugged into AC?

I have my 8530w I use for work with a OCZ Vertex LE, and a mechanical HDD in the drive bay, I have Nvidia. I also only really ever use it in the docking station.

I've never had a problem in about 6 months of daily use with the vertex, or ever with the mechanical drives in over 2 years use of 8530w's.

I also run an 8530w 24/7 as my HTPC for over 2 years now too. That one has all 4 sata ports full of 500GB drives; internal, optical, docking station and esata. Also a couple of USB drives hanging off it too. Never had a problem with that either, except for having to blow out dust from the heatsink fins every few months.