W520 + Intel 510 SSD freeze!

Hey guys, I am getting random freeze with my W520 + Intel 510 SSD. I am using primary bay and replaced the 320 GB WD HDD with Intel SSD.

Any solutions?

 

"Freeze" as in the system goes out to lunch and never returns? Or simply pausing for a while?

 

Does the freezing occur when you do a restart? It's quite an known issue with the W520 (and the T420) with that particular SSD. Intel suggests not to turn on any BIOS passwords with this SSD otherwise it will freeze. There isn't a solution to this problem at the time of writing.

 

It freezes for 15 seconds and it shuts down itself.

No, it happens during the normal operations.

 

Hmmm strange one. Is this with a Clean Install of Windows 7 or by Recovery Disk? Have you also installed the latest Intel RST drivers with it?

 

I downloaded Acronis and cloned the drive on a external drive. Then, installed the SSD and recovered the clone using Acronis.

 

Ah cloning software can be a bit iffy, especially migrating from a HDD to SSD. You might want to check the partition alignment using this tool. If it still plays up I would suggest using the Recovery Discs instead, I haven't encountered any troubles when I did a test recovery on my spare SSD.

 

My laptop did not come with Recovery disk, how can I get them?

 

There should be an option to create your Recovery Discs if you kept your original Lenovo factory hard drive. You can have a read of my clean install guide which tells you how to create your own Recovery Discs (the section should apply for all new ThinkPad's not just the T420).

If for some reason you can't do this or you wiped your factory image then you probably need to call Lenovo for the Recovery Discs for your system, though likely they will charge you for obtaining a new set of discs from them.

 

Wow, the same thing happened to me last night. I have a Crucial 300 SSD installed as the second drive.
It froze then powered off - no bluescreen & no shutdown. After rebooting, I saw no errors in the event log except that the previous shutdown was unexpected.

I'm definitely concerned about this as I lost data and only received this laptop (new) 4 days ago.

 

Does it exhibit this behavior with the drive that shipped with the machine?

 

Try switching the SSD to the primary bay, are you using a clean install (with SP1) on your system or Lenovo factory image? Also is this under Legacy (BIOS) mode or UEFI?

 

Not sure which drive was at fault, however I can tell you that I was working on a virtual machine that was located on the 2nd drive (the SSD). The cursor stopped moving for about 15 seconds, there was no hard-drive activity, the screen was still present but frozen, the fan wasn't loud, the laptop was cool to the touch, and then it turned off abrubtly - black screen.

It's the factory install. I'm not sure what you mean by legacy/uefi - is this is a per-drive setting I can make in the bios ? What impact would it have ?

Also, when you say to try the SSD in the primary slot, would I still be able to boot from the system drive, which would be in the cd-rom slot at that point ? Also, out of curiosity, how is that configuration better ?

 

If you're using the factory install then it would be under Legacy (BIOS) mode, I asked just to deduct number of possibilities since others may use Clean Installs with UEFI mode on which isn't bug free to speak.

Yes you should be able to define the boot disk priority under the BIOS, it doesn't matter should the system drive be in the hard drive compartment or the Ultrabay. The swap is just to see if its an odd connectivity issue with the Ultrabay in question. Personally I also run VM's via the Ultrabay using VMWare Workstation and I haven't encountered this problem myself.

 

I'll give it a try. BTW are you using an SSD - if so what kind ? And do you know if the Intel Rapid Storage Device app is required ?

 

My SSD is the Intel 510 120GB, I put Intel Rapid Storage Drivers manually without the software on my clean installed Windows 7 (UEFI). My VM's are all stored on the Western Digital 500GB Scorpio Blue hard drive in the Ultrabay caddy. I haven't encountered any crashing so far using this setup *knocks on wood*.

 

The plot thickens. In this scenario it could be anything. It could have been the virtualization product.

 

I kind of doubt this would be causing the issue, but if you guys are running factory cloned installations, did you uninstall/disable ThinkVantage Active Protection System when you installed the SSD?

 

You shouldn't clone from HDD to SSD, not because of alignment issues but for the pure fact that SSD's tends to dislike and lose more performance from cloning compared to fresh installations.

I did clone my Mac OS X installation once from the supplied Hitachi 500GB 7200RPM hard drive over to a Intel X25-M Gen2 80GB and two weeks later the SSD had to be replaced because cells was worn out. This was of course a 1 in 100000 situation which normally wont occur but cloning to SSD's in general isn't he best way to do things.