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My SSD hassles, what to do?

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Zonnza

Member
Joined
Sep 14, 2009
Location
Florida
First, my story:

I bought 2 SSDs back in sept 2009, both of them 60gb OCZ vertex turbo's.

I first used them in raid0 since there was no such thing as trim support for them back then due to firmware being unavailable for it yet.

For about 9 months they worked great then I started getting some errors from one of the drives. I managed to fix them with a chkdsk and some other means.

I got the same issue happen to me 3 months after that, and after lots of hassle and messing around, it resolved itself. A month later I had the same problem but this time I had no solution for it and my SSDs were corrupted to the point where I couldnt even attempt to fix them in any way.

At that point I reformated using the OCZ d-flash and updated the firmware on both of them. Reinstalling them seperately this time to take advantage of TRIM, they worked for a month or 2. Till yesterday where they messed up again. This time I used a special d-flash given from OCZ Ryder and reformated them, installing windows from scratch.

Once again, issues arise the next day (today) where one of my SSDs stops showing up in the computer.

Here is a thread to the issue I had and when I reformated a couple months ago with a d-flash and updated firmware: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?84259-Continuing-SSD-errors-corruption.


Now what Im thinking about:

It has been a huge hassle to deal with these SSDs since they started to give me problems. Im on the verge of either giving up on them (which I do not want to cause I put 500bucks into both of them back in sept09 ) and buying a harddrive and installing on that. OR, I might just buy a newer SSD, 120gb in size but don't know what to look at.

I don't want to deal with so many dumb hassles, with my 2nd SSD not showing or detecting, I cant install anymore programs since my main SSD has the OS and some important school programs on it leading it to have 10.5gb free on it. With SSDs, I was told you want to leave about 20% of its volume free for preformance so that is the 20% ish. I also noticed that if you get within 1gb free of these SSDs, they develop massive issues and crash if not stop working.


So Im sitting here now and the only place I can think of to go that can give me some wise advice would be these forums. What should I do? Go back to HDDs untill SSDs develop further and I can garantee myself some stable system uptime. Or attempt to stick with SSDs and buy a new one thats in the next generation up from what the vertex turbo was in(same gen as original vertex), so vertex 2 generation related SSDs.

What is the best thing to do for me?
 
Went out to eat and hang out with some friends for 2-3 hours, left computer on...

Got home, computer was frozen. Force shut down via power button, started back up into bios, loaded defaults; change to ahci, adjusted ram voltage/timings, left CPU untouched... booted back up. And my 2nd SSD shows up; why? How is OCing related to my SSD not showing?

I never had issues with OCing, my OC took my i7 920 d0 to 3.6ghz,

I remember back in the day I had it to 4.0 stable and 4.2 tops, but I took it down to 3.6ghz cause I didnt need all that power and extra heat generated.
 
Got home, computer was frozen. Force shut down via power button, started back up into bios, loaded defaults; change to ahci, adjusted ram voltage/timings, left CPU untouched... booted back up. And my 2nd SSD shows up; why? How is OCing related to my SSD not showing?
I don't know if this is the case here but I've seen several cases where a SSD will fail to show if you power cycle the computer too fast but then shows up again if you power cycle it again.

If you are still willing to stay in the SSD game but one a reliable, non-hassle experience I would recommend the Intel x25-M G2. It has the best reliability record on the market and has been out long enough that all firmware related hassle has been sorted out.

Neither the Indilinx controller nor OCZ are the most reliable nor hassle free choices.
 
can the x25-M G2 utilize TRIM? If so, does it have an option for manual trim? (like wiper.exe for the indilinx based units)
Yes, the G2 has TRIM support, and yes, the Intel SSD toolbox has a manual TRIM function.
 
Yes, the G2 has TRIM support, and yes, the Intel SSD toolbox has a manual TRIM function.

Interesting.

I have to be honest, in the last two weeks my vertex 1 has taken a dump on me twice. The first time, it blue screened and wouldn’t load back into windows. Did all the normal stuff, removed the overclock and tried safemode. Nothing would bring it back. Loaded up a spare drive, ran sanitary erase and started over. Worked for about a week, then last night – same story. I haven’t run sanitary erase on it yet, I just loaded up my vraptor as boot because I was frustrated and just wanted my computer to work.

I’m not gonna lie, I LOVE the read speeds these SSDs carry – but I’m SICK of having to deal with them all the time. I’m gonna do a little research, if general feelings around the web is good on the intel unit, I might give one a spin.

Thank you for the information. :)
 
The G2 is tried and true, but Intel does have a newer SSD on the market that utilizes SataIII.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...1711-_-EMC-031711-Index-_-SSD-_-20167042-L05D
Yes, but if your looking for zero hassle and high reliability, your far better of with something proven. Even the G2 had to go through a series of firmware updates before all the issues were ironed out. I assume this new one will have to do the same. This new one is also slower than the G2 in a few important benchmarks.
 
Yeah, I don't know much about the new Intel drives, but the specs look good w/ 450MB/s reads, and 210MB/s writes.
 
I had to set my processor OC to stock in order to have the SSD show up. It isnt worth it in my opinion to run stock just to see a 2nd SSD tho, so Im either gonna have OCZ RMA this or find a good fix (which i doubt). I love the power of SSDs but hate the hassle with my experiences so far.


I feel with ya ChinStrap, I been dealing with my 2 vertex turbo's for a while now. Each time I fix them, they give out again later on. Where the time between them giving out is getting shorter and shorter. This just seems like a product on its death bed and OCZ support hasnt really been all that great so far.

I been so frustrated over it and lost a lot of time I needed for school work and my internship work is falling behind my home made schedule cause of it. Having to scramble stuff together to get my internship work done on time.

For myself, I need to have a solid system setup that will not blow chunks on me for no reason at all. I only had 1 HDD start dying on me and I was able to get it replaced and GTG in a week and the HDD wasnt even dead by then. I dealt with these OCZ SSDs so many times spending hours on hours fixing issues, startup issues, raid0 errors, OS corruptions, random system crashes, SSD disapearing for no reason, etc etc.

At first I thought it was my other components. I tested the memory, the gfx card, I put the SSDs into another computer after all else failed and even then they had the same issue. Im down to knowing that the SSDs are the real problem here but ppl over at the OCZ support keep trying to give me other work arounds and reasonings.

Im still trying to figure out exactly what to do. It would be cheaper to just get a HDD and see how SSDs go for a while, but I need to do research into the intel SSDs and I was looking at the x25-M yesterday on newegg. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167035&cm_re=x25-m-_-20-167-035-_-Product
I think this is the one, is this the G2 one? I need to find out if this SSD is being still improved thru firmware or w/e. I want to have the most reliable thing I can get. And 120gb or higher (nothing over 240tho) is the size Im looking into.
 
Went out to eat and hang out with some friends for 2-3 hours, left computer on...

Got home, computer was frozen. Force shut down via power button, started back up into bios, loaded defaults; change to ahci, adjusted ram voltage/timings, left CPU untouched... booted back up. And my 2nd SSD shows up; why? How is OCing related to my SSD not showing?

I never had issues with OCing

I suspect the PSU. The PSU or board may be using crap caps.
 
I have a Kingston ssd , no issues at all, not to bash ocz BUT if any company has had high failure rates and complaints it is OCZ .. I was a fan of them back when a dual core chip was the new thing and after several power supply failures and memory failures I personally fell out of interest in that company.

Not to say any SSD maker cant have issues I just feel ocz is on the cutting edge of sales before quality.
 
I suspect the PSU. The PSU or board may be using crap caps.

I gotta make that post more clear, ill edit it..


Basically, when I came back, my computer was fine, skype was still on and i sat down and started talking to a friend... then I went to refresh some browser tabs for forum updates on here and ocz forums... it wouldnt refresh. Then I went to open a new tab and typed in a site, it wouldnt load, so i tryed to close the browser and reopen it but it wouldnt open anymore. I tryed a different browser, wouldnt open. At that point Skype volume dies on me, I try to X out the skype window cause its in the way and it freezes... so I try to alt-ctrl-delete to bring up task manager... nothing. Mouse is still moving around fine. Then I realize the system is doing its usual thing whenever I have to deal with SSD issues and I have to force shut it off.


I been thru lots of component testing with my computer. After it all failed. I had my brother agree to let me use his computer with my SSDs and it would crash the same way it did on mine. So I know 100% that it is the SSDs and not my other components.
 
i ran raid on with two ocz Agilities i never had any problems... im now down to a single drive since i wanted trim supported with the lastest firmware last summer. i still dont have any issues with my SSD.. i cant understand why so many others have so many issues with theres... im not saying it is not possible, i just find it rather weird so many do...
 
i ran raid on with two ocz Agilities i never had any problems... im now down to a single drive since i wanted trim supported with the lastest firmware last summer. i still dont have any issues with my SSD.. i cant understand why so many others have so many issues with theres... im not saying it is not possible, i just find it rather weird so many do...

I want to say that I seen the vertex and vertex turbo have the biggest problems. I have seen ppl complain about agility but no where near as much as the vertex and turbos. Take a look at the indiliux section of the forums at OCZ, u will see a lot of vertex and turbo issues, but agility problems wont be there much.

Anyways, from all I been through, I have started to question SSDs in general, but maybe it is just certain types. Like it said in an article from andtech, their ocz ssd's died within 3 months of them testing and printing a review. While their intel drive has been around for 2 years and still going.
 
The only reason I have the Vertex 2 in my sig is b/c I bought it for a customer, and it croaked on him 1 month in. He could no longer boot; it would BSOD after the Windows starting screen. No amount of chkdsk or repair could get him back into Windows. I was able to get all the important files off of it, though, but there was obviously a bad spot on the drive b/c it would freeze while trying to copy over certain files w/n 1 folder.

I offered to trade him my 300GB VR, so he could get back in action quickly, and not have to worry about RMA, etc. He agreed, and I was pretty excited about getting to play w/ an SSD. I do miss my VR, though.

I secure erased the drive, and it has worked fine for me so far, but as I've done more research into SSDs and used this one they aren't as great as I made them out to be in my head. Not being able to use sleep mode and reliability are my biggest issues w/ these drives. Also when I was trying to back up all my customer's files the transfer rate slowed to a crawl when it hit all the small windows files...less than 1MB/s. SSDs are fast for typical operation, but for some operations they are very slow.
 
@Jason
A secure erase is about the same as a d-flash that OCZ offers. Although I was told by OCZ support that d-flash does a bit more then a secure erase and it resets the drive so its like "new". Well, I havnt tryed to secure erase my drive at all, just used d-flash. It is just a lot of trouble at this point to try and mess with this SSD from the fear/expectation that it would just die at any moment and I would have to buy/order and wait a week or so for a new HDD or SSD to arrive since I currently have no extra drives laying around to use as an OS drive.



At this point, I did a minor OC on my cpu today to 3.0ghz from the stock it has and my 2nd drive didnt disappear on me. So Im gonna leave it at that and research more into the intel SSD while I wait for the OCZ support to reply to my post in the thread that has been up for an extra day longer then this thread... Still no reply.

I don't know if they are stumped on my issue or if they just don't want to reread the entire thread since I posted an update in my original thread. (link can be found on my original post in this thread).

I encourage you guys to read it since it explains some of the stress I have had with these SSDs.
 
Also Jason, how long have u had the vertex 2 since u got it from your customer?
 
Does intel have a forum where they discuss their SSDs kind of like OCZ does? Im curious to see what people have to say there about the x25-m and see how many ppl are complaining. And if there are complaints, what kind of issues they are having.
 
Reading through your thread I begin to suspect the Indilinx controller doesn't have enough ECC. I have a theory of how the bit error rate increases as the flash wears out. To counteract this the SSD controllers do ECC. It might be that the bit error rate grows to be bigger than what the ECC can handle. This would cause random data corruption at slowly increasing rates. Especially with a high write amplification controller like the Indilinx I could see this being a problem.
 
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