P256 SSD periodically causes system to freeze

Tonight I got the P256 up and running on my Vista Ultimate 64-bit laptop via disk to disk copy from factory platter HD. Needless to say the performance boost was noticed immediately! Eager to really test it out I've managed to make the system freeze for about 60-120 seconds after hardcore usage.

 

Situation 1: Using the Eraser freeware program from SourceForge I was erasing a 450MB file with three passes of data. Once the third pass was just about done, Windows froze and the hard drive activity late was illuminated continuously. After that two minutes the system went back to normal.

 

Situation 2: Using Adobe Lightroom 2.3 (64-bit) I was flipping through Canon RAW image files, probably clicking a little too fast. The activity light did the same thing and stayed on for about two minutes. The music which was buffered into memory playing in the background started looping one short segment. Two minutes later, the system went back to normal.

 

Is this normal? Am I being too harsh? I have "Enable write caching on the disk" and "Enable advanced performance" checked on the drive. Not sure if that's a factor or not.

 

Still pretty darn happy about the drive. If it's a matter of slowing down and not doing so many things at once, I suppose I can do that. ;D

Well, I tried doing a fresh restore to the SSD from discs made by the system but the problem persists. I'm actually updating this from my BlackBerry because file copying has caused it to freeze again.

 

I've spent close to 9 hours trying to get this restore process to work and I have nothing to show for it. Rightfully so, I am a little annoyed at the moment.

 

Any other ideas to try that don't involve reloading the OS again?

I have no fresh install option. My laptop, as most seem to these days, did not come with any recovery software. I have to make my own and keep it on hand. The closest thing to a fresh install I can do is do a complete system restore from those discs.

Yes, it's Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. I can't do XP 64-bit because all of the VAIO drivers are only available for Vista. I'll try to acquire a Vista image and see if I can't get it to work that way, but I'm not keeping my hopes up too high.

 

If you have any other ideas in the interim, I'm open to suggestion. Appreciate the help thus far.

For what it's worth, the freezing occurred during all sorts of hard drive operations (file copying, program installation, etc). The more I used it the more the freezing would occur. It's like heavy loads to the drive where the bus might have been maxed out seemed to do it the most frequently.

 

Hopefully that makes sense..

I attempted a clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit this morning. During the install process the drive did its usual "freeze up with the HD light on" for up to five minutes on end. Had the drive (or my laptop?) been functioning at full capacity, I think Vista would've installed in minutes. Instead it took closer to an hour.

 

Once Vista was up and running, the freeze thing would occur as I was installing drivers for the various devices on the laptop. After a few more freezes and a sudden reboot while installing Symantec Endpoint Protection, the laptop failed to recognize an OS existing on the drive.

 

I'm sorry to say but I am close to being done with this.

Did some more digging around online. Seems that Windows Vista and XP don't align the hard drive partitions properly, thus causing the freezing/stuttering problem. There's a lot of info about it on OCZ's support forums. [i'd include a link but I think that breaks the rules.]

 

So now my question is, what offset do I need to set the P256 in order to have the partition aligned correctly in Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit? I experimented with 32kb and it seemed to help, though it didn't permanently resolve the issue.

Got the replacement drive last night. Initial testing indicates my stuttering problem may be gone with this one, but more testing is to follow. I've done more reading about SSD partition alignment and it seems Windows Vista/7 align solid-state drives properly so I'll give that a shot.

 

Will post results soon.

(Eraser freeware)

just want to point out that using any software like that does not work in the same way it does on an HDD, SSDs have an wear leveling device (same thats used on USB pen drives) so the 3 wipes you did would of simply wiped 3 different parts of the SSD to prevent overuse of the same parts of the SSD, so data is still likely there until 256gb has been written to the disk again, way round that is full disk encryption if you find your data is that important

 

an low level format mite of fixed the SSD problem (think any will do but not sure) that you had unless it was really an bad fault with the SSD it self

 

do not do full format or use CCleaner Wipe free space option as it could put the SSD into an degraded state (as well as shorten the life of the SSD), keep 20-30gb free on the SSD do not fill it to the point it has no free space left as that can sometimes make the ssd go slow (this info goes for any SSD in general)

 

an fresh install of windows vista or 7 is recommended over using OEM Product recovery dvds as the alignment may not be correct when using them

 

the Enable advanced performance in vista or 7 i have found does nothing for performance even on benchmarks best off (for safe data) and use the default first tick box (Enable write caching on the disk) make sure the option is staying ticked as well, as chipset drivers can some times make that option turn off, if its an intel chipset (ICH 8-10) and its set to AHCI, get the intel matrix driver from intels web site (02/2009)

 

make sure auto defrag is off superfetch and prefetchers as well as they are not needed due to the speed of the SSD (defrag just wears the SSD out, SSDs has very very low access times so fragmented or not it be the same speed)