Force 3 240 GB issue

[lpope187]

I recently bought two Force 3 240GB drives and have been seeing issues as well. I've only been using them for two days, but so far I've have several instances of BlSOD but my issues seem to be different from others posted here. Here is what I've done so far:

1. Installed drives
   
2. Installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
   
3. Patched Windows via Windows Update
   
4. BSOD & BlSOD
   
5. Upgraded Firmware from V1.2 to V1.3.2
   
6. Installed Intel RST 9
   
7. BSOD & BlSOD
   
8. Installed a bunch of Development Software (Visual Studio, etc)
   
9. Installed Intel RST 10
   
10. BSOD & BlSOD
    
11. Did the LPM Fix
    
12. Installed Office 2010 x86 SP1
    
13. BSOD & BlSOD
    

 

What's really interesting is that when I get the BlSOD, I see the drives in BIOS but the boot order is reversed from what set. For example the primary slot is Force 3 S1 and the secondary is Force 3 S6 and I explicitly setup S1 as the first boot device. I'm assuming the S# is the SATA port number. The drives are not RAID, S1 is the OS and S6 is my data drive for all of my development work. And the normal power off, wait a few seconds, power on doesn't seem to work - I need to go into the BIOS and sometimes reset the SATA mode to ATA, wait for Windows to crap out on boot and then reset the mode for Windows to load correctly.

 

What I suspect is the issue (at least in my case) is the windows update process. I'm not 100% sure how the update process works, but I believe that anything that patches Windows and requires a reboot (driver installs, service packs, etc) screws around with the MBR to launch the update process on the next reboot and that in turn causes the SSDs to cause a Blue Screen and the subsequent BlSOD.

 

The reason I say that is that it appears that the BSODs only occur on patches that cause the Configuring updates screen on shutdown and reboots. Any other patches (even from windows update) seem not to cause issues. I've installed SQL Server 2008 R2 and then SP1, SQL Server 2005 and SP3, Visual Studio 2005/2010 and their service packs without any issues. None of these cause the Configuring update screen on shutdown.

 

This does seem to coincide with others reports of the machine BSOD and BlSOD at night since that's the default time on when Windows should install updates.

 

I don't have a lot of options in BIOS on my laptop so I can't up the voltage or anything like that. I'm not sure what motherboard I have - I just know I have a Intel 5 Series 6 port SATA AHCI controller which I think is just SATA II.

 

I'm going to continue to run the laptop and see if I get any BSOD & BlSOD not caused by running windows update and report back.