[aphellyon]

I've had 2 Vertex2 in RAID0 (intel) for about 9 months with no problems at all. Then a few weeks ago, one of them starts dropping out of RAID when the system idles (red and green SSD LEDs are both on). This now happens, without fail, every time the pc is allowed to idle (usually between 10-20 mins). I can game all night long with no problems, but if I allow the system to sit at the desktop, or at a logon screen, the SSD (always the same one), will light up orange (red/green LEDs both on), drop from RAID and cause a BSOD. Turning the power off/on always gets the green light back, and I can usually boot back back into windows without issue (sometimes have to reboot twice to get it to see the SSD boot array).

So far, to troubleshoot, I've checked the RAM, switched the power/sata cables, switched the sata ports, made sure all sleep mode/hibernation in windows was off, made sure S3 was not selected in the BIOS, deactivated LPM on sata ports, disabled hot plugging in bios, tweaked ICH voltage, updated all drivers, updated BIOS, updated SSD FW, uninstalled AVG... still crashes at idle. I've also tried to image the SSDs to a back up array, but this almost immediately causes the red LED to light, then the drive drops from RAID, then BSOD again. I've also noticed that the SSD will "red light" and drop from RAID even when i'm booted to another array (dual boot system)... this doesn't cause a BSOD, but it still breaks the SSD array requiring a power down/reboot to get the drive to show back up. My next step is to SE both ssds, rebuild the array and clean install win7 and see if it still does it... (sucks because this was my gaming array and will take a lot of time reinstalling everything).

Anyway, I was wondering if anybody had an idea what's causing this. It seems to me that perhaps the ssd is failing when GC kicks in or something... which is why it only seems to do it after a prolonged idle, or sitting at the logon screen, or when sitting idle as a secondary array. Thoughts, ideas?

Thanks

[merz.38]

Are you running a raid controller on your board or do you have a card?

I'm running my Vertex2's on a marvel controller via the intel interface that came w/ my board and haven't had a single issue with it for like 1-2 years.

Also, I'm not sure you can switch the sata ports around on your board...? At least on my board, different ports are connected to different sata controllers, (there's a marvel, and something else on my board). But like I can't connect one drive to the marvel and one to the other if that makes sense.

Do you have access to 2 other drives that you could set up another array and test on the same controller? Maybe run some really intensive disk bench sessions and see if you can 'break' it?

[aphellyon]

I have a x58 E760 classified and I'm using the onboard intel controller. I was careful to keep them on the ports controlled by the Intel ICH10R chipset when switching them.

There are a set of ports on a Jmicron controller that also supports RAID... I was thinking about trying them on there as well before I did the SE/reinstall, but wasn't sure it would work. Is there any reason I shouldn't try this? I'm not sure if you can take an array off one controller and plug it into a different one.

I do have two other arrays going, but they are HDDs... plus all three arrays run perfectly under load/bench. It's idling that breaks the SSD array. I guess I'll try to mount them on a friends pc before I SE them... see if the drive fails the same way.

On a side note, does windows imager work well with RAID arrays?

[merz.38]

Interesting, I'm guessing if you switched them they're be no guarantee that the other chipset would recognize the array. You'd probably have to reformat them.

Is there like some low power consumption 'sleep' feature that the ssd's have that I'm aware of maybe?

Another thought: What OS are you running? Do you put your computer to sleep or turn it off regularly? I know when I was running vista I had tons of issues with putting my computer to sleep. I haven't had any issues with sleeping w/ windows 7, however, that being said, different configurations of hw could lead to some incompatibilities. If you are in a habit of putting it to sleep, maybe try turning it off when you aren't using it? Also changing your power configurations might help. Try running your power configuration at max high performance without any throttling of voltages.

What happens if you run something like disk bench for a sustained period of time? like >1 hour?

[aphellyon]

I'm running win7 64bit and all "power save" features were off. No sleep/hibernation, ACPI was set to S1 vs. S3 in bios and LPM feature was off.

Meh, at this point I'm pretty sure I'm just going to SE and fresh install... if that doesn't work I guess it's RMA time (yay).

At this point I'm mostly curious if anyone here has any idea why a SSD would go into panic mode while sitting idle.


EDIT: After doing a secure erase on both drives, recreating the array and doing a fresh install, the problem has gone away.