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I recently bought an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD. It's quite fast, but for some reason, the hard drive controller refuses to play nicely with it. I never had issues with my HDD before, and I was using the same drivers.

My main issue is that after about an hour of use, the hard drive activity LED stays on constantly, and I'm unable to do much besides bring up task manager. When I do, there are no processes using more than a normal amount of RAM/CPU cycles. However, when I try to pull up the Resource manager to check for disk activity, it refuses to load.

  • This seems to happen a lot when I'm installing Windows updates. I've gotten a few "KERNEL DATA INPAGE ERRORS" too after it starts locking up.

  • I've run Memtest multiple times, with no issues. Ubuntu doesn't seem to have any Disk access issues, so I'm doubtful it's a hardware issue.

  • The best lead I have on the issue is this event which occurs over 100 times before my Laptop BSODs: Event ID: 11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0.

  • This also pops up twice before the previous error occurs: Event ID: 11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

  • I'm using a Dell Precision M6300, with an Intel 965 chipset, and an Intel ICH8M - E/M southbridge. The Disk controller driver is version, from june 2009.

Thanks for the help, and let me know if I can provide any more information to narrow it down.

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2 Answers

First, check to see if there is a firmware upgrade for this drive. If there is one, flash it.

If you still have issues, then it may be a crappy drive. SSDs don't have the best failure rates. And it could have passed inspection, but still be bad. Ubuntu may not have issues b/c it using different portions of the SSD.

Run a hard drive performance test (hdperf in Ubuntu) and see what happens. Also, check the SMART params in system monitor or whatever its called in Windows now. If you have lots of issues - you should probably get a replacement.

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The firmware is current for the drive (2.22). When I run a performance test using hdparm, nothing appears out of the ordinary: root@ubuntu:~# hdparm -tT --direct /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing O_DIRECT cached reads: 506 MB in 2.00 seconds= 252.66 MB/sec Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 758 MB in 3.00 seconds = 252.44 MB/sec –  Zalnas Sep 30 '12 at 16:32
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up vote 0 down vote accepted

I downloaded the latest Intel chipset driver package, and it seems to have fixed my issues. Oddly enough, their Driver Detection utility didn't tell me that there was an update previously.

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