F60 SSD random pauses/hangs on Win 7

[shoey]

Hi all, newbie here..

 

I have a Dell 5770 i7 laptop, with which I recently replaced its 500Gb Sata2 HDD with a Corsair F60 SSD. Windows was fully reinstalled so everything is stock standard, but once in a while, at random, my machine will hang for 3-4 seconds (especially when I click on start menu, etc). During these hanging moments the mouse is still responsive but all windows themselves won't respond or render.

 

Any ideas?

[typh00n]

Does happen alot? After you just started the machine? Or after a while?

[Yellowbeard]

Please list the complete specifications on your laptop, your Windows version, and the drivers you are using.

[shoey]

typhoon: Its random - but I'd say once every 20mins or so..

 

yellowbeard:

dell studio 5770 15" wide screen laptop

intel core i7 Q720 1.6Ghz,

2x2GB RAM DDR3 SODIMM,

Ati Mobility Radeon 4570,

Corsair F60 SSD (Was 500gb hdd, now only using SSD)

Windows 7 64bit

 

I haven't installed any drivers specific to the SSD - basically removed old hdd, installed SSD, then boot from dell supplied win7 Dvd, format & install. is there any specific drivers or settings you would like me to find & list?

 

cheers

[shoey]

I've followed some of the optimization steps at the sticky threads of this forum, eg enabled trim, reduced pagefile size & disabled windows recovery. i haven't had too much time to play with the comp. yet but i haven't encountered the symptoms for some time yet.. maybe the cause was too frequent writes?

 

Edit: It just happened again.

[RAM GUY]

Did you install the Chipset drives specifically the IDE driver? If so, please try and uninstall the IDE driver and see if the performance does not improve. Also please run ATTO and post a screen shot.

[shoey]

Cheers thanks. Attached is the ATTO screenshot in the current state

 

http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/6161/atton.jpg Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

And device manager:

 

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/5481/attoa.jpg

 

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

[jacken2]

You should be getting far higher performance that the numbers you posted. I don't use ATTO, so maybe its a problem with that or maybe its that you placed it in IDE emulation mode which uses various firmware "tricks" (shall we call them that) that ultimately slow down the performance of a SATA drive.

[shoey]

Major Breakthrough!!!!

 

My whole drive (incl windows OS) was encrypted with truecrypt - the whole process was so seamless/set-and-forget that i totally forgot to mention it. I just fully decrypted, rebooted, and here are much, much higher ATTO results:

 

http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/5029/attoc.jpg

 

I guess the issue is probably down to truecrypt, despite claims that it does not impact performance. however its a bit concerning that i need to trade off performance for security...?

[jacken2]

Truecrypt is pretty fast actually. Try some of the more brutal encryption algorithms with Linux dm-crypt. On a similar system, you'll see under 100MB/s read.

 

To make matters more difficult, both Windows and Linux aren't pushing out commands as fast as most drives can handle them on most decent machines nowdays. Linux is far superior on the queue management and real-world environment side, but you can't really see a noticeable difference in most benchmark scenarios. Less than 10 years ago system memory was only able to operate in the hundreds of megs per second, so it is a rather giant leap that SSDs have done compared to the overall system.

 

All that said -- I highly recommend encrypting data even if you only get 80-150MB/s. Raw transfer speed isn't everything. On SSD, you still get _very_ high numbers of IO operations per second. To me thats fare more beneficial to a fast boot and application load time than anything like vanilla benchmarks.

 

I don't recommend encrypting just "documents" ... because there is so much data leakage in swap files, temp files, etc. If you go the encryption route -- FULL disk or nothing...

 

Enjoy that wonderful system!

[shoey]

Yep - it was the exact reason I chose to encrypt the whole disk in the first place - if laptop gets stolen + saved browser/email/IM logins etc... = big trouble

 

as you say i might just go back to full encryption anyway. im not too concerned that the raw speed is 80-150mb/s but the windows random pause is annoying. i am wondering if that is due to temp data being constantly written to disk, eg google chrome temp files, etc..

 

but many thanks for your help & everybody's help!

[jacken2]

The nearly-random feeling pauses on these drives is annoying. Its amazing that such an obvious defect wasn't caught by a QA team. Oh, no need to bother trying to change controller drivers or OS. The pausing is OS-independent, it'll happen on any TRIM-supporting OS.

 

If you hit a BSOD on Windows during or slightly after one of the pauses, its likely a bad error handling routine in the disk controller driver... The Win7 AHCI driver generally seems alright though.