W520 Intel 510 Problem

I work in the film industry and just switched to a nice new W520 coming from a macbook pro and for the first couple days loved this laptop.

Then I installed an intel 510 SSD and the love affair ended. When using premier pro and after effects the write speeds would sometimes be so slow it would take a full minute to save a project that normall takes but a few seconds.

Can anyone offer any suggestions to get this guy running a little more reliably with my SSD. I did a fresh factory install from the recovery disc and only installed the critical apps for work. I lost about 2 hours of critical work today when after effects randomly shut down on me and want to avoid having this continue to happen.

Thanks!

Tabb

 

Is it actually choking on disk writes or is it getting hung up in the save process somewhere?

 

I went to intel's site to see if there's any new firmware updates for the 510 SSD, but there aren't.


I'm wondering if in the W520 BIOS you have the SATA controller set to legacy. If so change it to AHCI mode.

Another factor I'm not sure about is whether you are using BIOS or UEFI.


Couple other questions:
1 - what OS are you using?
2 - How full is the 510 SSD
3 - Did you install windows on the 510 SSD or on a second disk in your W520

4 - .I'm wondring if updating your intel chipset driver will help. What chips set driver are you using? go to Lenovo's support site, drivers and downloads, find the download for the intel chipset under the Harddrive category. Read the ReadMe file, don't just install it. It should contain instructions on how to see which chipset driver version is currently on your W520.

5 - I'm wondering what kind of read writes you're getting. Run some benchmarks and let us know. Let's try and eliminate Premier pro as the source of the problem. I'm personally not sure what SSD Benchmark program to use. Do some searching or asking around to try and find one.

 

Put the old drive back in and see if the disk is the problem.

Renee

 

Renee - I swapped back to the stock drive and everything seems to be working fine now. Leads me to believe the 510 is bad, or I had something set incorrectly for its use.

gmoneyphatstyle - Not sure on legacy or AHCI, whatever it was set to by default. Same on BIOS / UEFI have not changed a thing from default setting.

1. Windows 7 64bit home
2. 510 had around 35GB available.
3. I installed windows fresh on the SSD using the Lenovo recovery disc with the 510 in the main HD bay.
4. Let me check
5. Let me check

Colonel O'Neill - I can't say for sure if it is getting hung up or writing extremely slow, I just know simple tasks are taking FOREVER

Thanks everyone for the input! I am really hoping I can iron out these issues as this machine really flies through what we need it to do, I just need to get it to a point where it is reliable.

best,

Tabb

 

Hi,
It would be a good idea to check the SSD partition alignment.

Here's a guy on intel forums with similar problems to you.
Partition Alignment: Intel Communities

Here's an explanation of why partition alignment is a issue with SSDs.
SSD Alignment - Windows 7 Forums

Here's how you check your parition alignment, (from the link above).
You enter these commands in the command prompt.
to open the command prompt: Start > Run > cmd
We're looking for a partition offset of 1024KB. But anything divisible by 4 is apparently okay.