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Is my SSD killing Windows? [UPDATE: fixed]

johnspack

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Probably not relevant, but I found the RST drivers to be platform specific. My 1st gen can only use up to rst 11.7, newer I get an error. The rst package does install high performance ahci drivers, it's not just for raid.
I don't run ssds, so not sure about trim support. Your platform probably only is supported by up to a certain version of rst as well. Just find the newest version that works, and see if it fixes it.
 
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The reason to look at the old bios info was to show what IRST drivers worked. Sorry I did not explain myself well. I was not looking for a bios downgrade.

I do think if you could borrow 1 stick of ram from someone, of another brand, it might be worth a try. I've read odd posts from people regarding the Corsair brand having compatibility issues due to bios conflict.
 

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Thanks John, I seemed to remember that the drivers were optimized and can even help to avoid data corruption. Trim is guaranteed on if W7/8/10 is installed directly on the SSD. I'll try those different versions.

js, are you thinking of something like AIDA64? I have this utility.
 
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Thanks John, I seemed to remember that the drivers were optimized and can even help to avoid data corruption. Trim is guaranteed on if W7/8/10 is installed directly on the SSD. I'll try those different versions.

js, are you thinking of something like AIDA64? I have this utility.

Try IRST 11.5.0.1207.

Yes, try AIDA64 or anything else you have and compare results with each program to see if one reports a different error than the other.
I'm saying look for uniform results to rule out SSD as issue, so if one result differs from the rest it may be the SSD is going bad.
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
TL: Partially Read...(sorry if you covered these things before)

What does the SMART data show?
Does your drive have the latest firmware on it?
Does your motherboard have the latest BIOS on it (or try rolling back if you recently updated it)?
Did you SE the drive and start fresh before installing it or just overwrite the previous install?

Another thing I just found at the ASUS website for the board...http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1150/Z97-A/New_SSD_List.pdf

Its not listed there. That said, it still SHOULD work, but... its not on the list...either because it wasn't tested, or because it won't work well.
 

qubit

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Thanks @EarthDog I'll get back to you in more detail later as I'm not by the PC now. I can say now however that my mobo has the latest BIOS, but these issues have been there over several versions now.

Hard Disc Sentinel reports the drive as 100% ok, although that's not a guarantee of course. This handy utility reads the smart data and actually analyses it, along with displaying it. www.hdsentinel.com

I'm not sure what you mean by SE the drive? What I always do is remove the partitions using the installation disc and then just hit next on the install wizard. In this instance, the drive has a data partition that I created after initially installing the OS almost a year ago which I've left there (don't worry, nothing especially important on it!). I then delete the OS partitions and install in the blank area.

EDIT: that data partition starts at approximately the 128GB point and the OS is installed at the front of the drive ie sector zero.
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
SE = Secure Erase the drive. This 'resets' it back to out-of-the-factory (writes 0/1's to it essentially). IIRC, you have to initialize the drive again to be able to see it. Its a step or two deeper than formatting it through Windows.
 

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Ah, ok. Is it really necessary though? What utility would I use to do it with?
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
Necessary? No. Just the 'cleanest' way to do it and how I always do it.
 

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Ok, looks like I nailed it: the SATA cable or it's connection at the mobo end, suspect a poor contact. My PC is working sweet now and I'm posting this from Edge on a brand new digital entitlement activated W10 install on my SSD before customising anything. :) Here's how the troubleshooting went down, for the techies here.

The SSD worked fine on my old rig with a solid 23 hours uptime, no glitches whatsoever.

The main rig also worked fine on the HDD the whole time. Note that it was connected to a different SATA port, however. It would have been better to run it off the suspect port with the suspect cable, but never mind, I didn't think of it.

I reconnected the SSD to the original SATA port using the original cable. This is port 1, a Marvell 6Gbp/s port, not an Intel port, which can only manage 3Gbp/s.

I began installing W10 again on the SSD and the installer locked up at the 8% preparing files point. Note that the capslock/numlock keys and mouse pointer continued to work, but there was nothing else happening. Reset the PC and tried again, this time bombed out with an AHCI driver error again. Nice, this is what I want to see for a fault confirmation. Definitely a problem with this port or cable.

Changed the cable and all was well - W10 installed fine. Used the suspect cable on an Intel port with my WD 640GB Black HDD and W10 installed fine. Twice. Reconnected the suspect cable to the original Marvell SATA port and the SSD and again it installed fine, twice. Note that I connected the cable the same way round, too. Therefore, it looks like the connection with the mobo port perhaps wasn't too good even though the cable was fully connected. I had seen all these problems over time despite me having already changed the cable once before. I've therefore changed the cable out and put the suspect one in my old rig to see if the fault transfers. Perhaps the port is faulty after all, but only very slightly which is why it's working now.

So far, it looks like I've fixed the problems. If they come back over time, I'll try the second Marvell port, as I don't want to lose half my SSDs performance by using the slower ones. If this is also bad, then I can only conclude that the Marvell controller is bad.
Thanks for all your help and suggestions people, much appreciated. :toast:

EDIT 20.11.15

Besides the cable which definitely looks suspect and has been replaced, it appears that the Marvell 6G port is also iffy as I still got some bsods, but that's much harder to say absolutely. Since I moved to the Intel 6G port a few days ago, these bsods appear to have stopped, although it hasn't been long enough to say conclusively yet. There's more troubleshooting details in further posts here from me and other members.
 
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Mussels

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run a speed test, as the marvells could actually be slower than the intels due to limited bandwidth.
 
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Great, glad you got it working.
 

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I'll give that a go, Mussels. It would be rather ironic if that turned out to be the case, lol.
 

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I'll give that a go, Mussels. It would be rather ironic if that turned out to be the case, lol.

if you havem ultiple drives on the same controller, bench em both at the same time. many of those controllers have PCI-E 2.0 x1 bandwidth behind them, which is pretty sad (and while some have more, its still sad with multiple drives)
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
run a speed test, as the marvells could actually be slower than the intels due to limited bandwidth.
The marvel controllers are slower than the native intel ports (would only notice on SSDs).
 

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@Mussels @EarthDog It's been a long time since I benched storage. I think HD Tune and CrystalDisk info would be able to do this? I'm at work now, so can't look into anything in detail right now.

If I remember correctly, this SSD can max out a 6Gbp/s connection, so the difference between a slow port and a fast one should be easy to see on the benchy.
 

brandonwh64

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The marvel controllers are slower than the native intel ports (would only notice on SSDs).

This is VERY true! Intel sata II controller gets 1000MB+ in raid 0 when the marvel sata III controller gets barely over 200MB in raid 0 on my Z68X
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
@Mussels @EarthDog It's been a long time since I benched storage. I think HD Tune and CrystalDisk info would be able to do this? I'm at work now, so can't look into anything in detail right now.

If I remember correctly, this SSD can max out a 6Gbp/s connection, so the difference between a slow port and a fast one should be easy to see on the benchy.
ATTO = Best case scenario and how MFG 'rate' their drives. You would want to use this to see if you are being topped out by the controller as it will give you the most obvious answer. Run it at a Queue Depth of 10 (I think default is 4?).

We also use Crystal Disk Mark, AS SSD, and IOMeter (we use custom runs, not useful here) for our reviews to get some 'artificial' numbers.
 

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Ok, I've got us some rough and ready benchies and they look a bit odd. The SSD is connected as a slave drive in all tests.

The performance of my drive on my particular system in a read test with the latest HD Tune 5.60 is apparently pretty crap for an SSD, so I can only suspect that I need to install a better driver perhaps. Note that the HD Tune screenshots show performance with Samsung RAPID Mode disabled, but more on a suprising result later.

Here it is on the Intel 3Gb/s port:




And here on the Marvell 6Gb/s port. Better, but still doesn't even max out the slower port.




I then ran the performance benchies on the latest Samsung Magician 4.8 application. With RAPID Mode disabled, I got very similar results to the above, which is what one would expect. When I enabled it, the performance jumped significantly. However, HD Tune continued to give the same crappy benchmark as before, which suggests that Samsung Magician might be lying about the performance. If this was really the case however, then I would have expected it to have come out by now in a mini scandal, so perhaps it's the way that HD Tune is accessing the drive that's making the difference?



Above is the result with the SSD on the Intel 3Gb/s port. Note that it's curiously slightly higher than the one on the Marvell 6Gb/s port which is very suspicious since the SSD can't get this performance (near its maximum) on a 3Gb/s port. Only the random writes are within a reasonable margin of error.



This is a very anomalous set of results so can anyone explain what's going on here?

At least the PC continues to work with perfect stability so far. :)
 
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So... Question: You said that you suspected that the motherboard may have issues from day 1.
Have all the issues past and present been fixed by the change-out of the bad sata cable?
 
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Ok, I've got us some rough and ready benchies and they look a bit odd. The SSD is connected as a slave drive in all tests.

The performance of my drive on my particular system in a read test with the latest HD Tune 5.60 is apparently pretty crap for an SSD, so I can only suspect that I need to install a better driver perhaps. Note that the HD Tune screenshots show performance with Samsung RAPID Mode disabled, but more on a suprising result later.

Here it is on the Intel 3Gb/s port:




And here on the Marvell 6Gb/s port. Better, but still doesn't even max out the slower port.




I then ran the performance benchies on the latest Samsung Magician 4.8 application. With RAPID Mode disabled, I got very similar results to the above, which is what one would expect. When I enabled it, the performance jumped significantly. However, HD Tune continued to give the same crappy benchmark as before, which suggests that Samsung Magician might be lying about the performance. If this was really the case however, then I would have expected it to have come out by now in a mini scandal, so perhaps it's the way that HD Tune is accessing the drive that's making the difference?



Above is the result with the SSD on the Intel 3Gb/s port. Note that it's curiously slightly higher than the one on the Marvell 6Gb/s port which is very suspicious since the SSD can't get this performance (near its maximum) on a 3Gb/s port. Only the random writes are within a reasonable margin of error.


This is a very anomalous set of results so can anyone explain what's going on here?

At least the PC continues to work with perfect stability so far. :)

Rapid mode is like ramdisk. Where you use the ram to store data . and because ram is so much faster the built in benchmark shows this unreal numbera. Because its mostly your ram sped . anyway dont think about it .bi personally left it off because i dont see it benefits me in any way m
 

qubit

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So... Question: You said that you suspected that the motherboard may have issues from day 1.
Have all the issues past and present been fixed by the change-out of the bad sata cable?
It's not as clear as that, unfortunately. First off, I haven't been using that particular cable since day one. The initial crashes were too random and infrequent to pin down and could have been caused by software too. I just had a feel that the mobo wasn't quite right. I did also overclock the CPU to 4.7GHz later on which we all know is a #1 culprit for crashes and weirdness, so I stopped overclocking it after a while in the name of stability, which did improve. I might come back to overclocking it perhaps, but given how there's no compelling reason to upgrade to Skylake and replacing CPU, mobo and RAM is quite expensive, I'm going to keep this platform for some time longer, therefore I don't want to risk shortening the life of my CPU with an overclock, as much as that extra performance is quite noticeable and welcome in games, especially the latest one where the framerate isn't quite so stratospheric.

Also, there have been several BIOS updates since I got it and I've flashed them all as they were released. The descriptions on at least some of them mentioned stability improvements, so it's quite possible that any mobo instability has been eliminated by now. Certainly I'm not seeing any crashes with it at the moment. I'm still running that WD Green drive on the original suspect SATA port using a different cable and it's been rock solid. It could be different with the SSD, but by the way I saw some rather obvious instability I talked about above completely disappear, I think it will continue to be stable with the SSD.

Rapid mode is like ramdisk. Where you use the ram to store data . and because ram is so much faster the built in benchmark shows this unreal numbera. Because its mostly your ram sped . anyway dont think about it .bi personally left it off because i dont see it benefits me in any way m
Ah, no wonder, thanks. :) I guess I could have googled it, lol.

This could lead to potential compatibility and instability problems besides eating up RAM, so I'm gonna leave it off too.
 
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Thanks for the feedback. If you experience more issues update this post.

I'm very curious about the sata cable that's bad: What brand, make, model?

Such an esoteric problem that leads back to one of the least expensive parts in a build. Cables are never evaluated or reviewed.
 

qubit

Overclocked quantum bit
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Oh, it was just some bog standard one that came with one of the various mobos I've bought over the years, I have no idea which, so it could potentially date all the way from 2003. On top of that, it was a terribly boring grey for its sins! :p

Note that I haven't technically finished troubleshooting this issue as I haven't run up the old PC with it yet (I'm being lazy and haven't bothered because it's on the floor in some awkward place, lol and I just use it for backups) but I'll have to do it today, before my backup becomes too out of date.

Note that it did occur to me right at the start of this little saga to swap out the cable. However, I didn't do that, because for such an intermittent fault it was better to swap out the components the way I did for better confidence of where the fault lay. Finally, it could be that either the cable has a little break in it which is affected by flexing (it's a stiffish cable) or perhaps the contacts at the mobo end had become a little oxidized* over time and just needed re-plugging to wipe them clean. If it works perfectly in the old PC, it may not be possible to know which. On top of that, it's still possible that the mobo connector is the culprit and that the SATA cable that's connected right now is a slightly tighter fit and hence making better contact. Over time it may start playing up again...

*Preventing this oxidation problem is why better connectors are gold plated. I suspect that neither the mobo or the cable connector are gold plated in this instance.
 
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Benchmark Scores Faster than yours... I'd bet on it. :)
Such an esoteric problem that leads back to one of the least expensive parts in a build. Cables are never evaluated or reviewed.
for as many that are used, it is very rare to have a sata cable go bad or be bad. That said, I am still certain they are all QC tested before they leave the factory.

@qubit - no atto run?
 
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