Trouble with new SSD for my C drive.

[TheForce]

I recently installed a new OCZ Vertex 4 SSD for my OS and installed software. It's a 256 Gb drive and has about 140Gb free space. Windows 7 Professional 64bit OS. The install went great and the drive is very fast with 1/4 the boot time. I ran the TRIM verification test and it confirmed the system has TRIM loaded. I have a very basic idea what TRIM is and what it is doing for me.

OK, after two days of heavy use, editing video with no more bottlenecks indicated on my C drive the Video editing was working to maximum speed, that is at rated frame rate and full HD resolution. I was very pleased.

On the third day I started to observe editing crashes with the log stating the software has stopped communicating with Windows for an unknown reason. The crashes became more frequent as the day wore on. Eventually, I could no longer boot the software. It would just fail to respond. I uninstalled it and reinstalled but no go. I kept getting windows errors.

I have now pulled the SSD and replaced with my older slower HDD and was back in business editing.

I have another SSD in the computer that is just a data drive for storage of video files and it continues to work and feed video without errors.



Any of you SSD experts understand what is failing here? At this point the SSD C drive won't even boot windows. Its like the drive is getting corrupted.

 

[Ilya]

I am no expert with SSD, but have you tried installing the latest firmware? For Vertex 4, I believe the latest firmware is 1.4RC.
Make sure to contact OCZ technical support for assistance. They might be able to help you with troubleshooting.

 

[mcintire123]

Sounds like you got a lemon IMHO. You say it only lasted 3 days before it started to go corrupted?

 

[mike123abc]

I hate to say it but reviewers often gloss over firmware bugs in SSDs. After trying a few brands I finally decided to only use Intel ones. They may not be the fastest in the benchmarks, but I have never had a glitch with any of them. I am satisfied with the performance. If you can send it back, I would and get an Intel one.

 

[TheForce]

Illya- Thanks for the suggestion I will look into that. After discussing this with some other Vegas Pro experts, I think I need to also repeat the cloning of my C drive and try the conversion to SSD again. It's possible something was not transferred right in the upgrade process. I have some more traveling soon also need to complete a project before Wednesday so I'll be remaining on the HDD until next week.

 

[StevenD]

If you cloned your old drive to the SSD, you may have an alignment problem.

http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-...ned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance

 

[Ilya]

Cloning from HDD to SSD is not a good idea!

Sent from my iPad 3 using SatelliteGuys

 

[TheForce]

If you cloned your old drive to the SSD, you may have an alignment problem.

http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-...ned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance

Interesting! I will certainly do the test. I'm not sure I understand the correction process but maybe if I do a clean install of my windows 7 to the SSD and then do a restore of my programs from a backup, this should work, right?

I used Apricorn cloning kit that was recommended for doing what I did. If the start partition is 64 then this would not be my problem, right? I'm in the middle of a 6 hour render right now so I can't test the SSD at this time.

 

[StevenD]

Interesting! I will certainly do the test. I'm not sure I understand the correction process but maybe if I do a clean install of my windows 7 to the SSD and then do a restore of my programs from a backup, this should work, right?

I used Apricorn cloning kit that was recommended for doing what I did. If the start partition is 64 then this would not be my problem, right? I'm in the middle of a 6 hour render right now so I can't test the SSD at this time.

I believe a clean install will solve your issues. And double-check your firmware for an update.

 

[TheForce]

OK- Here's my test results:

SSD- OCZ Vertex 4

Partition #0
493.19 MB
Partition Starting Offset- 1048576 / 4096 = 256
Partition #1
11.52 Gb
PSO- 519045120 / 4096 = 126720
Partition #2
226.47 Gb
PSO- 12889096192 / 4096 = 3146752

So, according to the article each of the Partitions is evenly divisible by 4096 so it appears this is NOT my problem.

I got a utility toolbox from OCZ and have verified that they have an update to the firmware but this will wipe the drive requiring a reinstall. My current version is 1.3 and the new one just released is 1.4. I will try the update next but they also said the release notes that the installer is still in beta, use at your own risk.

 

[StevenD]

OK- Here's my test results:

SSD- OCZ Vertex 4

Partition #0
493.19 MB
Partition Starting Offset- 1048576 / 4096 = 256
Partition #1
11.52 Gb
PSO- 519045120 / 4096 = 126720
Partition #2
226.47 Gb
PSO- 12889096192 / 4096 = 3146752

So, according to the article each of the Partitions is evenly divisible by 4096 so it appears this is NOT my problem.

I got a utility toolbox from OCZ and have verified that they have an update to the firmware but this will wipe the drive requiring a reinstall. My current version is 1.3 and the new one just released is 1.4. I will try the update next but they also said the release notes that the installer is still in beta, use at your own risk.

While its always a good idea to backup a drive before a firmware update, I have never seen a drive wiped out by one.

 

[TheForce]

Not only did the toolkit from OCZ wipe the drive clean, it failed to do the firmware update with an error message stating unable to update firmware due to an unknown error. So, I recloned the drive as I did before and its working again just as fast as before. I'm trying a 6 hour render now to see i9f it completes without errors.

I not only have the original C HD drive, I have a nightly backup being done to a network drive so I feel comfortable experimenting with this.

I'll say one thing, this system with the two SSD's and the new FirePro V8800 graphics card sure does render fast. It's clipping along at 5 fps. The i7-950 renders at 1 frame ever 4 seconds. If the drive doesn't crash, this will be done in a fraction of the time.

 

[DustoMan]

I noticed a problem with my laptop shutting down unexpectedly and I think it started happening after a recent firmware update. I updated the Intel RST software to a newer version hoping that would fix it, but it didn't. I ended up uninstalling the Intel RST drivers completely and just going with Microsoft stock drivers and that seems to have done the trick.

Also some tips I've learned putting an SSD into my laptop and also using one with a motherboard that supports Intel's Smart Response Technology:

Make sure you clean install your OS as Windows 7 will detect your SSD and make some modifications to the OS that makes it work better that won't happen if you take an OS installed on a good-old magnetic drive and image it onto the SSD.

I found this Elpamsoft called SSD Tweaker software that supports a bunch of versions of Windows that does a lot of the SSD specific tweaks with one mouse click. Stuff like disabling Drive Indexing, Superfetch, and some other more obscure registry tweaks.

When updating firmware, you probably need to put your SATA port in ATA mode and not AHCI or RAID mode if the drive isn't detected.

 

[TheForce]

Is the best way to do an install of the SSD, to take a virgin SSD drive and install my windows OS DVD. Then do a restore from the backup of my original C drive?

I also have another problem. I purchased the computer with Win 7 Home Premium installed. Later I upgraded on line to win 7 professional. So, my DVD installs as Home. will the restore from backup automatically upgrade me to Professional on the SSD?

Or, is none of this possible and I have to start over like a brand new computer build with a fresh copy of windows 7 professional?