It has some sort of aids I believe.

On Wednesday last week I came home from work, turned it on and walked away for 15 mins while I put the kids to bed etc. I come back and it's sitting on the windows update screen "preparing updates, please do not turn off your computer"

I thought, huh, that's weird so I ate my dinner while I waited and still nothing happened. I gave up and rebooted, it goes back to windows update, somethine like "update failed, reverting changes" which again sits there forever and doesn't change.

I fucked around for a while getting into safe mode for a while to see if I could figure out wtf was going on but couldn't find anything obvious. Eventually I got the shits and resorted to the windows 7 install disc to do a "repair" which it couldn't, neither could it do a rollback to any of the previous entries.

I ended up doing a full reinstall of windows, not a huge deal as I have an SDD and with ninite.com and google sync I can get back up and running like nothing happened in an hour or 2.

I do all that and it works fine for that night. I boot up the next morning and on first boot it loads into windows like nothing happened...until I click on chrome or any application, it just doesn't nothing, I can move my mouse around windows the desktop, highlight and select things and see the interaction highlights happening, but nothing loads, no matter how long I leave it.

I rebooted and things seemed fine, but almost every time I turn on my PC I have to load it once and reboot it with the same problem, but on top of that chrome seems very slow and unresponsive fairly frequently.

I have my page file and desktop etc mapped to a traditional HDD with windows and all my applications on an SSD. This is my 3rd (or maybe 4th? I've lost count) SSD, I've had previous ones flat out die on me under warranty and replaced which is where I'm at now with this OCZ agility 3 (the previous 2 were Vertex 2s)

If it's the SSD again I'm done with them, the previous ones all lasted about 3 months and this current one is about that old now so that's why I suspect it may be that. Last resort I have with it is a complete reformat and windows install.

So has anyone got any ideas to the cause? or avenues of investigation?

Or don't buy a shit brand like ocz. Gave me a heap of issues. Crucial and Intelsat have been fine and I thrash them.

(by fine I mean over a year old and still performing well)

Yep its aids, best to just take it out back and shoot it now.

Or don't buy a shit brand like ocz.

Exactly, stay away from OCZ and Corsair - they don't know what they're doing.

if it's the SSD then I'm done with them until they're more reliable

The SSDs from Crucial or Intel are more reliable than most of the regular mechanical drives currently on the market from both WD and Seagate. You just got bitten by buying an SSD from the wrong manufacturer :/

last edited by parabol at 23:52:06 15/Jul/12

hmm this sounds more like a setting is wong somewhere.

what are your system specs?
have you got anything overclocked?
what motherboard do you have?
make sure you have your ssd pluged into the right sata socket, some mobos have different controllers for different sockets and some dont even support trim even though windows says they do (marvell 9128 for example) .
what settings in bios have you got going on? eg. Gigabyte mobos have multiple AHCI settings for different sata sockets if you are using a x58 chipset.

i have not really had any drama with ssds for about 2 years until recently but thats because my mobo doesnt support what my ssds are trying to do. SSDs are awesome its just a fuck around to get them working correctly and making sure they are compatible.

BTW i have a vertex 2 se and a vertex 4

Apparently you need to be using AHCI with hotplug turned on for the Sandybridge and Ivy Bridge Chipsets, and have to avoid any sort BCLK overclocking.

Or you could buy a normal hard drive and not have those issues.

Wait, so you can't just plug in an SSD and expect it to work properly?

I just put in an M4 and it works but I certainly haven't been blown away by it's performance, in fact some games take longer to load on it than they did on ye old platter drive.

Is that because I haven't set it up right or because people blow the SSD performance increase way out of proportion and I was expecting too much?

i had this problem a couple of days ago, it is pretty easily fixed although this time i just reformatted because i wanted to get to know 8 before it starts coming out.

i have seen it before, and it does just appear to be a windows update that is fucking with the system. From memory last time this happened, you can still login to safe mode no issues at all so get in there and system restore can help, to before the updates installed.
Although when I did system restore, it restored fine but computer would bring up password screen, let me type password but then lockup.

I think I just manually removed the update that was failing last time but like I said, 30 minutes to full reinstall windows, copy Diablo 3 back on and bam good to go.

you should be ok with that setup wetwired. i would just double check all settings but this winfails update may ahve been the issue, possibly google the update and see if other people had the same problem.

I just put in an M4 and it works but I certainly haven't been blown away by it's performance, in fact some games take longer to load on it than they did on ye old platter drive.

I would put money on it you have not got your drive set up properly.
Do an ATTO test on deafult settings and see what you get.

Things commonly overlooked with SSD setup:
The SATA socket you are using (SATA 3 not SATA 2 otherwise your limited to about 280mbps, then make sure you use the correct SATA 3 socket for maximum speed (you can find out what controller chip you have in your mobo manual and what sockets it is assigend to) and make sure it is compatible with your drive if not you may need a PCI-e add in card. Not all motherboards are setup like this so just do some research first.
AHCI settings for the SATA socket you are using and ACHI for IDE control.
The SATA cable itself can sometimes be an issue
TRIM support and keeping your drive up to date with firmware updates etc..
dont use over 80% of the drives capacity.

Wait, so you can't just plug in an SSD and expect it to work properly?

Not running an SSD in AHCI mode is a bit like not running a HDD in UDMA mode and picking IDE instead :p

No AHCI = No Trim, no NCQ.

There's a Linux-based updater you can boot from a USB stick with: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?99275-NEW!-Bootable-tools-for-OCZ-SSD-s

This is why you will not catch me with a SSD, Not worth the speed increase if it dies in the arse with in 6-12 months. Mechanical HDDs FTW, Huge space and reliable.

I used to think like that until I got an SSD. Now whenever I use a regular PC and I go to open something I wonder what's wrong because it doesn't open instantly. Then I remember normal hard drives take a while to do stuff. Trust me, if you open/close things frequently all day, they're worth it.

I got 2 120gig ocz ssd and have them currently running in raid 0, first few days my OS was flaky as shit, then i found a firmware update for my drives and I haven't had an issue since.

Yeah, when I was looking for an SSD I saw there was a firmware update to the OCZ drives to "fix" them but after a "recommend me" thread on here, I was steered towards an M4 and I haven't looked back. No need to fuck about with linux boot discs, swapping drives around, updating firmware, etc. Just plug it in, install windows, enjoy.

deadlyf you have to install an AHCI driver in windows if you're changing your boot drive to being AHCI over ide.

Normal HDD's have an ACHI mode too. ACHI to many users just means you can plug and unplug the drive on the fly like a USB, but it also has some performance associated with it too.

Sweet, cheers guys. Changed the reg keys and it auto installed a windows driver.

It actually does seem a lot faster already.

Ok we'll I've updated the firmware, I was already running AHCI mode, thing is it's intermittent. sometimes it'll boot up and be fucked, other times it's fine. So at the moment it's hard to tell if it's better because of the update or because I got lucky this time.

Yeah I'd probably go with a Live Linux CD to see if that would change things and to make sure the drive is working.

You could also possibly try:
http://falconfour.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/falconfours-ultimate-boot-cdusb-4-0/
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

Might even be able to boot off a USB device. Just with a boot disk per-se you can boot through the CD/DVD/USB Device and have that jammed on in the background. Not to sure if it would help though.