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I have a new SSD (Kingston Hyper 120GB), with a fresh installation of Windows 7 (and several HDDs). For no apparent reason, my computer freezes. I cannot move the mouse, the sound glitches, but after about 10 seconds everything returns to normal. Any suggestions?

Shinrai
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Bzzz
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  • Are you running your drive in IDE, AHCI, or RAID? – Shinrai Oct 19 '11 at 22:15
  • Related: http://superuser.com/questions/253961/why-does-my-windows-7-pc-ssd-drive-keep-freezing – Tamara Wijsman Oct 19 '11 at 22:21
  • Troubleshooting: http://superuser.com/questions/205298/how-do-i-troubleshoot-a-windows-7-freeze-or-slowness – Tamara Wijsman Oct 19 '11 at 22:22
  • IDE, I have old motherboard – Bzzz Oct 19 '11 at 23:12
  • Related: http://superuser.com/questions/326379/vertex-3-with-asus-p8p67-pro-b3-locks-up – Mr.Wizard Oct 20 '11 at 00:33
  • @Bzzz - Running an SSD over IDE in and of itself can cause these sorts of problems, nevermind anything else! Mr. Wizard is totally right about SandForce, though. – Shinrai Oct 20 '11 at 19:47
  • @Shinrai, is it more than a matter of TRIM support? I didn't focus on this issue because he said "a fresh installation" and I thought these problems would not show up this soon. – Mr.Wizard Oct 21 '11 at 04:49
  • @Mr.Wizard - There's that, but the more likely short term problem is that the controller isn't usually optimized well for that and at a bare minimum you can expect greatly reduced performance. (I've done testing on Intel drives and seen a 50% performance decrease just from switching a machine from IDE to AHCI!) – Shinrai Oct 21 '11 at 14:17
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    @Shinrai that makes sense. Also, I wonder what kind of MB Bzzz has that it doesn't even support AHCI. Bzzz, can you give a Motherboard make and model, please? – Mr.Wizard Oct 21 '11 at 15:17

1 Answers1

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I believe that SSD uses a SandForce controller, which has known problems. If you search for "SandForce Freezing" you will get lots of hits.

I believe there are some Registry settings that may at least mitigate the problem.

Here are some threads for reference:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2189868

http://thessdreview.com/Forums/kingston/952-3.htm

http://www.patriotmemory.com/forums/showthread.php?7158-Patriot-WildFire-120GB-Random-freeze-Sudden-reset-BSOD&s=fe62939508e29376f402b7a5f9c24a84

http://www.overclock.net/ssd/1112136-there-still-issues-sandforce-sf2281.html

You should also see if there is a firmware update available, but I suggest researching that before you flash, as there have been cases when that caused worse problems.

There may be hope for this issue however. See:

http://www.techspot.com/news/45902-sandforce-bsod-bug-identified-ocz-first-to-provide-fix.html

Mr.Wizard
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  • +1 for looking into this (or having a similar experience). – Tamara Wijsman Oct 19 '11 at 23:38
  • @Tom thanks; no personal experience, but I have heard enough complaints about this to stay away from SandForce based SSDs for now, no matter how attractive their benchmarks are. (Also, those benchmarks can be artificially high, since SandForce uses data compression: if your data can be compressed, you benefit, if not, you don't.) – Mr.Wizard Oct 19 '11 at 23:40
  • The failure rate is also significantly higher. – Shinrai Oct 20 '11 at 19:48
  • I didn't see any actual solutions in those posts. – northben Jun 11 '13 at 04:32