Weird hard drive behavior, intel x-25 raid 0

[csflame4]

Recently my hard drives have been acting weird, this is going to be hard to explain but ill do my best.

Every now and then my hard drives will just start doing something, the hard drive activity LED on my case just stays on, it doesnt flicker or anything, when this happens I cant really run any programs, iTunes will not boot up, some of my games wont even boot up, the windows system health report wont even work correctly, it just hangs on the page were it says collecting information for 60 seconds. Ive looked through task manager I dont see anything unusual, i even check the performance monitor and theres nothing unusual in there also. Even when I try and shut the computer down, it will sit on the shut down screen for longer than normal, and then when the monitor turns off this is when the computer turns off also, but it stays on and the hard drive LED is still on. Is this intel's version of garbage collect? It never did this when I just had one SSD

This is extremely frustrating and im about ready to reformat, even though this windows installation is not even a week old. I have all of the required tweaks for a SSD to run correctly, so I cannot figure this out.

If I just leave it on and let it do its thing, when it finally finishes, I still cannot run some programs, sometimes if I restart it will not do it again and then I can play my games and run iTunes, but also sometimes when I restart after it has finished, it will do it again once it turns back on

 

[sub mesa]

So have you checked if one of your drives is running in PIO mode? Sounds like it, and you've only been the 300 millionth person affected by it.

 

[sminlal]

Is it possible you've arrived at the computer just at the point where it's going into sleep mode? I've found that if I try to do something after the computer has decided to sleep but before it actually shuts itself down then it behaves somewhat as you've described. I've now learned that when I return to the computer from a break to check the activity lights before I start trying to do something - if I wait for it to actually sleep then it wakes up just fine.

 

[csflame4]

It happens right when I turn the computer on. I have heard of PIO mode but I am not familiar of how to check this on my computer

 

[sub mesa]

Try with HDTune, do a simple benchmark, finish it, then make a screenshot and post it here.

If you have multiple drives, you should do this on each disk you have; if one of them is running in PIO mode this may explain the slowness you were experiencing.

PIO will make your system go very slowly, even with light load like clicking Firefox. You may experience the mouse being "choppy" or skipping at intervals due to excessive interrupt usage.

 

[sub mesa]

Also, what Operating System are you running?

 

[csflame4]

Im using windows 7 ultimate 64 bit, it hasnt happened recently, I removed diskeeper and its been fine ever since ill post a screenshot of AS-SSD benchmark, ill also post a screenshot of the IOP's

Remember im using 2 intel 80 gig x-25 m's in raid 0

 

[sub mesa]

I don't know this Diskkeeper, but if it intercepts all I/O and processes it with its own drivers/services, it may have well caused a significant slowdown in the IOps rate, and thus cause your slow system behavior.

Remember, many 'optimization' programs do not apply to your Intel X25-M SSD; the less of that stuff you install, the better.

Also, may i ask what stripesize you are using?

 

[csflame4]

I use a 128k strip size, are those numbers about were they should be? or do they seem low

 

[csflame4]

I did some comparisons on the benchmarks numbers, and the only one that seems lower is the 4k-64thrd, everything else is good it seems

 

[sub mesa]

Your numbers look excellent, though the 64-threaded random write could be bit higher.

The 128KiB stripesize is the recommended one; that would mean each stripe is aligned with one flash block, as Intel SSDs use 128KiB flash block sizes. So that's all very good.

 

[csflame4]

Ok cool, everything has been running very smooth since I uninstalled diskeeper, maybe that also did something to make the 64 thread run slower

 

[csflame4]

sorry to bring back an old post, but this problem is still happening. Im getting so tired of it because my computer is basically useless besides the internet, I cant run any programs when it does this. Im about ready to reformat but I really dont want to

 

[sub mesa]

Test all your harddrives for PIO issues; give us a list of your harddrives; test them with HDTune. Does any of them show high CPU utilization or a horizontal score result?

 

[csflame4]

how do I test my drives for PIO issues?

 

[sub mesa]

Run the standard HDTune benchmark on them. If it shows a flat line under 20MB/s and CPU utilization is very high (close to 25% for quad-core; 50% dual-core), then it's likely that drive is hit by a PIO issue.

PIO will cause the entire PC to freeze, when the drive is accessed.

 

[csflame4]

Ok I will test it today

 

[csflame4]

ok here is what I got on the standard test

Im running two Intel X-25 M G2's in raid 0 and 1 Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB

Intel SSD raid 0

Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB

 

[sub mesa]

No other HDDs? No external/USB drives?

Your 1TB drive and RAID0 are not affected by PIO.

Can you explain again what performance aspect it is exactly that bothers you? Does it freeze now and then, be slow when opening programs, etc? Is it only with specific things or all things? Did you disable all antivirus/anti-whatever protection that runs on the background? Have you looked at system services like System Restore, Superfetch, Indexing Service?

 

[csflame4]

Oh I do have an external Western Digital my book 1TB, here are the results for that.

Every now and then right after system start up the hard drive LED light will just stay on, programs like iTunes, windows media player or any game will not open up when this happens. Randomly after a few minutes any program that I tried to open will just open out of no were. I can use Google chrome and do anything on the internet during this time though. I even check the task manager resource manager to see if there is something in there that is using alot of resources, but there isn't. It always just shows the normal programs. When I try and shut the computer down, it goes to the screen were it says a program is running and you can either wait or force the program to stop, after that it will stay on the windows shut down screen for awhile, finally the screen will turn black but the hard drive LED light is still on and then the computer will turn off after awhile. Sometimes it will continue to do this if I turn the computer back on, I usually just have wait for it to finish doing whatever its doing. System restore, superfetch, and indexing are all disabled on the SSD.

 

[noobz1lla]

this sucks to hear. Makes me not want to put my SSDs in raid

 

[csflame4]

Im actually starting to think its not a hard drive problem now. I decided to reformat because I was getting so tired of this problem. So I booted onto my backup windows partition that is on my WD storage drive so I can do a full format on the two SSD's. The same problem happenes again, this is a totally different windows partition and has nothing installed on it. It happened when I opened up ISOburner so I can put secure erase on a cd and run that, ISOburner just hung there and did nothing during this time, it finally stopped and I was able to burn the cd. It also happened again while I was formatting both drives, both drives just stopped at 24% complete, and then like five minutes later they jumped up to 75% complete.

Basically my computer just cant do anything while this happens, and now that it happened on my other windows partition, im wondering if this is a motherboard problem, any ideas?

 

[sub mesa]

You already used Memtest86? If not, leave it running for a night long. Ensure you have a stable system to begin with.

 

[csflame4]

Sorry again to bring back the post. Im getting to the point to were im going to get rid of these intel SSD's. The memory has no errors. My computer was running fine ever since my last post, but now its doing it again. Its actually worse, just now it did it and I let it do its thing and then it stopped, I started up battlefield and it did it again and battlefield will not boot up, nor will any other program besides google chrome boot up. I still cant find any unusual programs that may be causing this. I found one though that im not sure about, when I check my resource monitor, it shows C:\Windows\Prefetch\readyboot\Readyboot.etl Every time that program is reading/writing the most bytes. I have the prefetcher disabled in my registry, so could this be the issue?

It was doing it during the whole time I made this post and for about ten minutes after, I then just turned the computer off, took about 2 minutes to turn off. I turned it back on, It did it again fir about five minutes, tried to boot up battlefield again, would not boot up, and now my computer is pretty much unresponsive besides google chrome.

I dont know if this matters or not but my intel X-25 SSD's have different serial numbers on them, and different model numbers.

Model: INTEL SSDSA2M080GSGN Serial: CVPO939501D2080BGN
Model: INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC Serial: CVPO0035013M080BGN

Both are intel 80 gig X-25M's with the most current firmware on them 2CV102HD

 

[sub mesa]

I think there may be something with your install; it can't be the SSDs themselves.