Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - Page 2

jmke · 20th March 2009, 12:58

interesting thread here about the Indilinx controller used in OCZ Vertex, it seems to create some issues when the SSD is full...

Quote:

my rig:
nforce4 ultra/Opteron170 with (all) 4 ports in use by SATA2-HDDs, no RAID, using WinXP-Pro with nforce-driver v6.99

1) got my OCZSSD2-1VTX30G delivered late last week
2) found out about new firmware v1199 (but not about alignment with diskpar yet), which the drive didn't have
3) flashed new firmware (on 2nd PC with ICH5-R, because nforce-sata with installed nforce-driver wouldn't work)
4) reattached vertex, cloned my OS-Partition (16GB in size) in Windows using OO-DiskImage to Vertex. 5GB remained free on C:
5) bootet from vertex, enjoyed results very much. Installed MFT, created one partition with all available space left on drive.
6) setup windows-swapfile to C: 64MB and MFT-Partition to 3GB. Enjoyed performance over the weekend. Didn't do much on both partitions. No major install (fill) of C:, did bench 1 time with atto on MFT-Partition, copied about 1GB of quake3-data to MFT-Partition and played for 15 Minutes, that's all. Nevertheless, i got pretty heavy swapfile usage, since my computer runs 24/7 while using firefox with 100+ tabs and doing stuff with graphics.
7) now it's getting interesting:
copied 4GB ISO-File from another HDD to MFT-Partition.
when done, copied that file from MFT to C: Partition, while at the same time, copied one 700MB avi-file from C: to MFT-Partiton (so 2 copies made at the same time on the same drive (since i'm using SuperCopier, i can see the actual transfer-speeds).
then, after maybe 20% of the 700MB file was copied my Computer froze, with HDD-LED permanent ON. Waited for about 5 minutes (in hope the smaller of the two transfers would finish and it might unfroze, but didn't).
pushed Reset.
Vertex couldn't be detected by BIOS anymore, just tried to detect drives for about a minute (HDD-led was still on permanently). disconnected both cables from drive, re-attached it, pushed reset again. All drive(s) were detected again.
WinXP wanted to check drive-integrity (chkdsk) on start. Indeed it had to "repair" file-security information on every single file which took a while. Then BSOD.
Reset again, switched boot-drive to old HDD (previously cloned drive) in BIOS. Went back into Windows. When accessing Vertex in Explorer everything seemed ok. Chkdsk repaired about 5MB data on C:, everything else seemed to work (backuped about 2GB userfolder from SSD to normal-HDD with no error).

Cleared vertex with gaijin's WipeDisk. Then found out about alignment which doesn't seem to work properly somehow, since the vertex wouldn't be detected by WinXP drive-managment, but it gets a drive-letter assigned and i can copy data to it. When cloning my OS to the aligned partition again, it wouldn't boot from it.

That's it for now. I'm planning on reflashing the Vertex tomorrow (with new firmware if possible), then align and format it again and do a fresh WinXP-install on that drive), which i'll backup regurarly, until all pending issues are fixed. Just to be safe.

7 pages long already: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=53290 near the end new firmware is tested by OCZ which does seem to improve/remove this issue