SSD randomly shoots to 100% load and freezes all applications

[Danieltjee]

Hello,

I have a slight problem with my SSD, which is a Mushkin Triactor 480GB SSD to be specific.

Whenever I perform a task that may require the SSD to work hard (screen capturing, video editing), the application I'm using will randomly freeze for about 20 to 30 seconds.

In Task Manager, the C: Drive (the SSD) will show 100% load for the entire freeze, fall back to 0% after 30 seconds and will continue working again.

I have read a post about this problem, stating that the problem might be that something went wrong with Windows drivers for AHCI. I have tried changing the AHCI setting to IDE and back to AHCI again, but with no success.

This guy had the same problem:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2276734/autodesk-applications-randomly-freeze-ssd.html?xtor=EREC-8889&_ga=1.83385366.1473553188.1465326746

 

[Ralston18]

Run "perfmon /rel" (without the quotes) at the command prompt and monitor system performance accordingly. Look for red circles and click for error codes.

And in Task Manager try to identify the process or servcies that start, are running, or stop when disk use goes to 100%.

But first of all back up your data immediately. Could be a failing drive and you need to protect yourself there before doing anything else.

 

[Danieltjee]

Ran the performance monitor and clicked all red circles. My pc is only a week old, so there is not much need for a backup. The red circles I clicked were all 'not responding' errors and some were reports of applications not responding and crashing afterwards.

No process or service starts or stops when it disk usage goes up to 100%. The applications this most frequently happens with is Movie Studio Platinum 12 (video editing software). This makes sense because it constantly needs to read data from the hard drives. But the fact that it has so much trouble doing so, makes me think something is wrong here.

The thing is, even with my old pc (a prebuilt from 2010!) I had a better experience when video editing. I never had MSP 12 crash there and it only had a pretty weak Dual Core.

I really expected this PC (the build listed in my signature) to perform a lot better, but it only does up to a certain extent.

 

[Ralston18]

Are you comfortable with opening the case and checking all of the connections and card seatings?

Run a few diagnostic's especially any for the SSD. Maybe do some benchmark/performance testing as well. May discover some mis-configuration some pending failure.

And review the MSP system requirements against your computer's specifications. May be some other mis-match.

There are a variety of utility programs that will do such things. Just be careful of what you download and where you download it from.

 

[Danieltjee]

I'm not comfortable with taking the SSD apart.

I have benchmarked the SSD using AS SSD Benchmark and got NO result, because of the problem. It got through the Seq. category with a write and read speed of around about 450MB/s (which seems normal to me). Then for the 4K category it only managed to start the test. A few seconds into the test it froze, I looked up the disk usage in Task Manager, and found it was at 100% and no data was being written or read.

Though it not impossible, I think it's unlikely there's a mis-match here; I did a lot of research on all of the components before ordering them and even had the list of components checked by a professional builder.

All other SSD health check utilities show a perfect health and really low temperatures for the drive. I also connected an old HDD to see how it would work, but it seems to have the same problems. However, I think this is because of problems with the C: drive, which is the SSD.

 

[Ralston18]

Apologies: I meant the computer/desktop case - not the SSD. Opening the SSD would certainly negate any warranty and otherwise end badly.

Intermittent problems tend to be some connection being loose or some unique combination of events that occur. All sorts of strange things can happen.

Another option is to go into the computer's Event Viewer logs and look for error codes and warnings.

Can be a cumbersome process but you will not do any harm by simply looking through the various folders. Once you get the sense of things you can start looking at individual log entries by clicking into them for more details.

Look for patterns, large groups of errors, or anything associated with the SSD or disk activity.

 

[Danieltjee]

Apologies: I meant the computer/desktop case - not the SSD. Opening the SSD would certainly negate any warranty and otherwise end badly.

Intermittent problems tend to be some connection being loose or some unique combination of events that occur. All sorts of strange things can happen.

Another option is to go into the computer's Event Viewer logs and look for error codes and warnings.

Can be a cumbersome process but you will not do any harm by simply looking through the various folders. Once you get the sense of things you can start looking at individual log entries by clicking into them for more details.

Look for patterns, large groups of errors, or anything associated with the SSD or disk activity.

Wow, I think I've just found a large group of errors under 'warnings'. For the last 7 days, there are about 10000 warnings. I looked for the categories with most errors and the categories I found had most warnings were 'disk' (listed multiple times, with a total of 7.5k warnings), 'storahci' and Nfts. Almost all warnings seem to be storage related.

For all of the 7.5k warnings for disk it says 'Failure has been detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a (I guess) pagefile operation'. Don't know the exact translation as my Win10 is set to Dutch.

 

[Danieltjee]

Did some more research and came across this post in Microsofts Support section: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083595
Symptoms perfectly matched my problems, the warnings I was talking about in my previous post were almost all ID 129 warnings.
Disabled MSI in regedit and everything is extremely smooth now. Put SSD under load with no failures, no more freezing. Made it through the AS SSD Benchmark flawlessly.

Thank you for your help Ralston18. I seem to have found the solution myself. Hope this helps other people with this problem.