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Seemingly SSD-related freezing

I

Indolentron

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 10, 2005
Messages
210
My computer goes through fits of weird freezing. The cursor will work, but Firefox or whatever program will stop responding, while others still work briefly but soon stop responding as well. I can click on things on the task bar and the bar responds but programs wont open and right-click menus won't properly load frequent docs etc. I have to hard reboot, and the issue will often reoccur in 5-30 mins. Once in a blue moon, the computer will respond again after a minute or two, but in general it is permanently frozen. Spells of these freezes last an evening or two and the spells are usually weeks apart or longer.

My system is:

Intel Q6600, 2.4ghz
Abit IP35 Pro
Crucial Ballistix DDR2, 4gb
Radeon 6950 2gb
Intel 510 SSD, 120gb (system drive)
2x Seagate 320gb HDDs in RAID0
WD 1tb HDD
PCP&C 640W PSU
NOD32 Antivirus

I've had components overclocked at times, but the issue happens even if I go a very long time without doing so. Temps are fine.

Most of the system is pretty old, and the problem didn't start until sometime after I got the SSD last summer. I've had suspicions that it was related to getting the drive too full (>90%) but clearing off space doesn't immediately fix it, so I guess not. The only newer component is the video card (January) but I think the problem had already happened a few times before then.

Any ideas? I've found a few stories about Intel 510s freezing, but nothing that resolves this issue.
 
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Indolentron said:
My computer goes through fits of weird freezing. The cursor will work, but Firefox or whatever program will stop responding, while others still work briefly but soon stop responding as well. I can click on things on the task bar and the bar responds but programs wont open and right-click menus won't properly load frequent docs etc. I have to hard reboot, and the issue will often reoccur in 5-30 mins. Once in a blue moon, the computer will respond again after a minute or two, but in general it is permanently frozen. Spells of these freezes last an evening or two and the spells are usually weeks apart or longer.

My system is:

Intel Q6600, 2.4ghz
Abit IP35 Pro
Crucial Ballistix DDR2, 4gb
Radeon 6950 2gb
Intel 510 SSD, 120gb (system drive)
2x Seagate 320gb HDDs in RAID0
WD 1tb HDD
PCP&C 640W PSU
NOD32 Antivirus

I've had components overclocked at times, but the issue happens even if I go a very long time without doing so. Temps are fine.

Most of the system is pretty old, and the problem didn't start until sometime after I got the SSD last summer. I've had suspicions that it was related to getting the drive too full (>90%) but clearing off space doesn't immediately fix it, so I guess not. The only newer component is the video card (January) but I think the problem had already happened a few times before then.

Any ideas? I've found a few stories about Intel 510s freezing, but nothing that resolves this issue.
Click to expand...

There is so much it could be. Intermittent problems are the hardest to diagnose, especially when you can go weeks between occurrences. Memory would be the first thing to check, get a boot cd with memtest and let that run for a night. Check your hard drive smart stats. Make sure your bios and drivers for all hardware are updated to the latest. Make sure the intel ssd toolbox is installed which will inform you of firmware updates. The next time it happens a suggestion would be to try a linux liveCD, boot into ubuntu or something like that and use firefox for an hour or so. Does the problem go away?
 
Thanks for the replies. The Intel SSD Toolbox says the firmware is up to date, and the SMART data is all in the clear. Earlier when I tried to run the SSD Optimizer it had an error, but it's working now (at some point I hibernated my computer). The full diagnostic scan says everything's fine.

There are a few repeated errors in the event viewer:

The DgiVecp service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the device specified.
Click to expand...
Doesn't seem serious but I found a post about it and changed some registry entry that should stop the trouble.

The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

The previous system shutdown at 9:20:20 PM on ‎4/‎16/‎2012 was unexpected.
Click to expand...
These don't really tell me anything useful.

This message is from the day before the spell of freezes, dunno what to make of it. The drive was pretty full, but clearing off space didn't fix anything.
The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because the shadow copy storage could not grow due to a user imposed limit.
Click to expand...

I've run memcheck before without finding issues, but I do recall that if I enable the BIOS memory check on startup, at some point it reboots the computer; I have to skip it. I can believe that something isn't quite perfect with my RAM, but does that really seem like the kind of hardware issue to cause these weird gradual freeze-ups rather than instant ones? At any rate, the issue has stopped for now, so whatever else I try, I won't know for a while if it fixed anything.
 
Find out what the DgiVecp service is and if you don't use it shut it off in services?

The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because the shadow copy storage could not grow due to a user imposed limit.
Click to expand...
Are you using system restore and have a size limit on it?
 
The problem is back after almost a month. There were no full-on freezes in the meantime, but there were some similar-feeling freezes that lasted up to a minute and seemed to be caused by NOD32.

I ran memtest for a few hours and it found no errors. I'm currently running Ubuntu off of a USB drive and it has not frozen after more than an hour, which definitely would be long enough for the freeze to occur in windows. I still have the feeling that the freezing is related to my SSD, but I don't have any conclusive evidence.

Any more ideas?
 
Funny story, I'm running a system like that with SSD's and hard drives in RAID. I noticed that when I was playing D3 [installed on RAID drives] i would have horrible lag spikes that were system wide, and resource monitor showed me that the RAID partition was experiencing big que depths.

I moved the data off and unmade the RAID, and the problem has ceased. Can you unplug the RAID0 drives without damaging the system?
 
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried that just now; the crash still occurred in typical fashion even with the RAID0 drives unplugged.

Another potentially useful fact: I don't even have to log in for this to happen. If I restart and then leave my computer at the log-in screen for a long time, then finally type in my password and hit enter, it accepts the password and says "welcome" with the loading icon, but never progresses beyond that.
 
At one point, some Marvell controlled drives like the 510 had a problem with power management with some systems. Are you using RST drivers? See what the Intel toolbox says under DIPM (device initiated power management).
 
No, I meant, are you using Intel RST drivers or MSAHCI.sys? If you don't know, you can check by running AS SSD. It will say so in the top left corner either iastor or msahci.
 
Ah sorry. It says iaStorV.

This last reboot, I turned off NOD32 right away since I suspected it might somehow be involved. A freeze seemed to begin with Firefox, but other programs were more responsive than normal, and eventually Firefox pulled through. I think this has happened before, though there have also been cases where everything was still frozen 30 mins or an hour later.

*edit* It's been a fair while since the last hitch, so maybe the problem is gone for now. Afraid to reboot though...
 
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