Crashing - Questionable SSD installation

[Csphilli]

Hi,

Quite new to the forums. There was a thread back in 2010 that is relevant to this post but I thought necroing a 2 year old thread is bad taste. Also, I will provide more details later such as ATTO/AS SSD pics but I hope you don't mind me trying to get a head start typing this out at work

Components
I purchased the below roughly a year ago:
Asus P7P55D Mobo
2 x Gskill 60gb SSD
Intel Core i5-750
2 sticks of RAM
And a standard 1TB HDD just for pictures, storage, etc.

I hope that is enough specs for starters. Please let me know if you need more.

My potential 'problems'


Computer hard locks

Recently my computer has been experiences crashes. Not a BSoD but rather the monitor will turn a solid color (black, orange, yellow have been what I've seen) and the computer can only come out of that state via forced shutdown holding the power button. I originally thought it was due to an old video card. Instead of buying a new one, I used my original 8800gts. So I swapped that out in favor of a GTX280. Problem still persists. Last night I changed the thermal compound on the CPU/heatsink. That may or may not work but I dont think the lock ups Ive been having are due to overheating. I ruled out the crashes being a memory issue by running the memtest overnight. It didn't detect any errors.

Windows auto-partitioned my OS drive

I bought 2 of the SSDs with the mindset to run the OS strictly on drive1, and games on drive2. When I open the control panel I see 3 drives (not counting HDD). The oddball is a strange 100mb partition that I had no part (to the best of my knowledge) in setting up. I had no reason to set up a separate partition on the OS drive. No idea what that 100mb partition serves or if it's perfectly normal. Anyone have a suggestion if this is a red flag in my setup?

Windows not recognizing SSD as an SSD because of Defrag

This is with respect to the 2 year old thread I mentioned. The previous poster was defragging on a scheduled basis and messing up his SSD. I went into my settings and opened up the defrag schedule, opened the menu of selectable drives to defrag and only my 1TB HDD was listed as a choice. I thought 'good, windows is not recognizing the others'. However, the defrag history is showing that my SSD has actually been defragged in the past. I should also mention that the 100mb partition and the SSD dedicated to games has no history of defragging. What gives? If I cannot choose to defrag my OS drive, why is Windows automatically running a defrag on it?

Incorrect TRIM driver?

I wanted to verify if TRIM was enabled. As many have said, Windows7 should do this automatically. According to the checks, it has. But I'm not sure if the correct driver is being utilized. It's not the Microsoft ASCHI driver, nor the 'Standard....' driver. Sorry, can't recall the name off the top of my head. The driver though is utilizing an THIS driver. Is that correct?? Please note, I didn't manually download that one to begin with. Should I be using something else?


So, I hope this hasn't been a bunch of - I hope someone out there has some advice on what I can do about the installation of the SSDs. I'm thinking a bad install with them is what is ultimately causing my crashing but I'm here to find out!

Thanks for reading and please let me know what else I can provide you.

 

[shadowdr]

The 100 mb partition is normal for Win7, it is the actual boot partition that allows access to the repair functions on bootup. I can't say that I am fimiliar enough with Intel to know what their latest drivers are but they do release them fairly regularly so it may need updating. I also can't say what the issue is for sure but I would suspect that the power options are set for sleep or hibernation and disks to turn off after 20 minutes. I know that sleep or hibrinate worked on my setup until an MS update put a stop to it by hard locking the computer each time it entered one of those states and the only option afterward was a reset. Check the power options in control panen and set them to Put to sleep "never" and under advanced settings Turn off hard disks "never" and see if this puts a stop to it. These settings may reset at random of after a bsod on their own. It is at least something to check even if it is not the problem.

 

[Woomack]

If you don't want that 100MB partition then format your drive before you start installation and then pick install without formatting. Also install system with only 1 drive plugged in so windows won't move that 100MB partition files to 2nd drive. After you finish system installation just plug 2nd drive and that will be all.

 

[Csphilli]

Thanks for the tips. I just had a major crash that knocked out my computer. Had to reformat everything.

Now i've got the SSDs set up in raid0, TRIM on, defrag off, etc.

But the crashes have started again. I don't know where to look for a faulty piece of hardware now.

I have no idea what to make of them anymore. They occur at completely random times...sometimes even seconds after windows boots into the desktop.

I hope someone can tell me that these benchmarks rule out faulty SSDs?

What about a faulty motherboard? How does one perform a diagnostic on that?