P3 128 Issues (I THINK)

I've had my Performance Series 3 for about ~60 days now, no real issues up until a few days ago... Now bear in mind, I can't actually verify it's the drive, but here are the symptoms.

 

 

I get random "crashes" and by crashes these aren't blue screens or random restarts, literally the computer will just stop responding. My windows will freeze, I won't be able to access any programs or anything that pulls data off my primary HDD, it goes into "thinking" mode forever. My cursor is still live, and I can move it around, it's not a hard lock.

 

There have been ZERO changes to my system, I can still play games, and run highly cpu/video/memory intensive applications without issue, no BSOD, no random restarts.

 

 

These random crashes are becoming more and more common and they seem to occur once i leave my desktop idling for a length of time (not going to sleep). I also have set in my power management not to turn off my hard disk when idle, but that hasn't seemed to help.

 

 

Any ideas???????????????????????

I concur with Ram Guy. Also, I just had problems with freezing on my primary box After installing the Win 7-64 SP1. I restored a pre-SP1 image of the drive using DiscWizard, and the pc was good again. I then manually selected the SP1 and remaining Win 7 patches for individual installation, and the freezing problem has gone away.

I don't have any BSOD, that's what I said in my original post, as I am not having the typical instability crashes like you would with bad ram, an overclocked CPU, etc.

 

 

The one thing, I have installed SP1, but that was like two weeks ago, and it wasn't through Windows update.

 

 

Testing the SSD in another machine? That's a gigantic waste of time, and would require me installing an OS on another machine, I guess without activating Windows it would be no big deal though.

 

 

 

 

What is the process for RMA's through Corsair? Is it an express ship, where they ship a new drive, then I ship my old one back? Please don't tell me they want me to send my drive in first so they can try and "repair" it.

What is the process for RMA's through Corsair? Is it an express ship, where they ship a new drive, then I ship my old one back? Please don't tell me they want me to send my drive in first so they can try and "repair" it.

Both :)

 

Standard RMA is you ship to them (your cost), then they ship back (their cost). After you get the RMA approved you can ask for an advanced RMA where you provide collateral (credit card) and they ship a replacement first.

I had the exact same problem with my Performance 3 64GB. The computer worked fine as long as I didn't leave it idle for about 20 minutes.

The problem first occured when I installed SP1, and nothing solved it but a reformat and installation of Win 7 with SP1 integrated.

 

The exact same hardware worked just fine with a mechanical HDD.

It's the drive. I had the EXACT same thing happen. Eventually it died. Windows install said it couldn't even install anymore, corruption error. I don't want to mess with that. I lost an expense report, some data from last month, etc worth so much more to me then the drive cost. Lucky for me, Fry's let me just return it after 32 days. I ordered an OCZ, but if that fails on me, I'm back to intel benchmarks be damned.

Good to know I'm not alone in this... I have an RMA setup with corsiar, but they don't have stock!?@ No one is buying this drive, how can you guys not have stock?

 

I'm outside of my RMA with Amazon to get full credit. I had to take a picture and send my actual invoice in for them to even allow an express ship, pretty insane.

 

 

I honestly don't even know if i want to use even another new drive, only to have this **** happen 2-3 months down the road.

I have a P3-128 which is not causing BSOD, but it causes Windows to freeze when i try to copy some large files (VM's) from the SSD to a regular HDD. The SSD has been used for about 45 days and it has worked very well until today. The VM's also freeze up while they're running. Windows still boots and most apps run fine, except for VMware. I tried to scan the hard drive for errors using the builtin windows utility, but the app freezes up after a few seconds of running. The only way to terminate it is the Reset button since Windows stops responding. When i ran Acronis true image to backup the SSD, i got a "failure to read from sector 6,702,480". I checked other HDD's in the same case, and none of them generated read errors. The SSD is on the intel sata3 port of the p67 mobo (with B3 stepping of the Sata2 controller) running in AHCI mode in win7x64 sp1.

RMA the drive. I had the same problem. The reason for no BSOD... the drive dissapears, so Windows can't pull the info from the SSD to even generate a BSOD. My problems was when the drives were under load, gaming mostly... I (my opinion only) think it is a heat issue (and not necessarily excessive heat), but Corsair will get to the bottom of it with these new drives. The reason I say this is, if I gave the computer a little time to cool off, or a little shot from a compressed duster can on the SSD, the drive would magically reappear.

 

The diffence was for me, in pointing to the particular SSD, I could see the drive had dissapeared from my array once I hard reset the computer. Upon reboot, the drive was missing in the Intel RST ROM. It was always the same drive, call to Corsair Tech support, suggested RMA.

 

I was still within the return period from the retailer I bought it, so I exchanged it there.

 

Seems like problem has gone away.

HD tune error scan ran for 7 hours. it got through 66gb of 128gb and shows 1.5% damaged blocks. I guess that's bad.

For what it is worth, I scanned the SSD for errors when i first installed it with HDT. I didn't get any errors in March. I also tried "chkdsk /r" and "sfc /scannow" and both of those scanners froze up when they were run on the SSD. The chkdsk ran for 2 hours, and it never got past 5% complete. I'll try out the parted magic secure erase and see what happens. Thank you.

parted magic 6 says the secure erase on the p3-128 cannot be performed. the security state is set to "frozen". I tried the hdparm -Y /dev/sdb and powered it off for 30 seconds. It still will not allow secure erase.

 

windows 7 can't initialize the disk any more. something is really messed up.

parted magic 6 says the secure erase on the p3-128 cannot be performed. the security state is set to "frozen". I tried the hdparm -Y /dev/sdb and powered it off for 30 seconds. It still will not allow secure erase.

 

windows 7 can't initialize the disk any more. something is really messed up.

 

If your SATA port is capable of being hot plugged or you have an eSATA connector that you can connect the drive to, shut the computer down, pull the power from the P3, first go into the bios and set the sata to to the hot plug setting, boot to the parted magic disk, and then plug the power back into the drive once you are loaded. You can then do the secure erase. If you boot with the drive plugged in, the BIOS locks the drive.