Advice from the hive mind?

Problems with my main PC, hoping the community could give me some guidance.

First the specs:

AMD Phenom II 965 @ stock 3.4
4GB DDR3 RAM
128GB Corsair SSD for OS drive
500GB Samsung HDD for programs
Gigabyte HD6950 video

I started having some performance problems recently, and suspected by motherboard (small leak in my water loop went undetected long enough to corrode a couple of pins but that's another story). That board was the MSI 890FXA-GD70. At the time the system would either not boot at all (it would hang just after POST) or at best it would get to the lovely Windows symbol and stop there).

I swapped all my parts over to a new Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 board and problems got worse. While it is functional, it runs like it's in quicksand. When I click the Windows icon to bring up the Start menu it will sometimes take 5 seconds or more to respond. Double-clicking the Control Panel or Computer icon on the desktop is the same story, response time varies from instant (rare) to 10 seconds.

When I do finally get a window open (in My Computer for example), when I open a folder it will also hang and actually read "not responding" at the top. So far it has always eventually responded, but it's ludicrously slow.

I thought it might be a driver/software conflict from the motherboard swap (I never cleaned or removed anything before installing the new motherboard drivers), so I wiped the SSD and did a clean reinstall of Win7 Ultimate 64-bit OS, no change at all.

So this new problem is better than the old one, in that I can at least use the system but I can't use it like this.

Any ideas would be great as I have never seen a problem like this one. Hopefully someone else here in The Collective has.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: I remembered I had some different RAM and tried that also. Went from 4GB of Corsair to 16GB of Kingston, in different configurations in different RAM slots with each type, both single and multiple, no change at all. $#(&*&(*!!!

BIOS set to AHCI for your SSD? I can't imagine it being the only cause but it's the first thing I'd check. You could also try disabling legacy settings (parallel, serial, etc.) as I've experienced weird issues in Windows due to conflicts.

Thanks! Believe it or not this turned out to be a problem with my SSD. I had another one with the same OS already installed so I swapped them and the problem went away.

I can't keep that one in my system so I made a new partition on my HDD and reinstalled the OS (again) on it and the problem is gone.

No idea what happened to the SSD and I guess I'll never know but it's sad. :(

Is it an older drive? If you can't RMA it, it might be worth checking out with Corsair's SSD Toolbox. You might be able to salvage it or determine if it's completely toast.

Yeah, there's no RMA on it, I'll check out the Toolbox. Never knew such a thing existed, thanks!

No problem! Most manufacturers have some software suite for their SSDs now, though many don't do a great job of making them known. They can be really helpful, particularly for firmware upgrades (how I learned about them initially) and for diagnosing problem drives (like the pair of Vertex 2s that I just removed). Hopefully you get some good news and the drive just needs a secure wipe and possibly some firmware :)

I've been hearing a lot about SSD's crapping out prematurely.... A LOT. I'm not exactly sure why but i'd guess it would have to deal with how often the drive is accessed, used and all that good stuff =p

i'd wager to say its not a good idea to use a SSD as the systems page file, and to use a USB3 thumb drive in ReadyBoost mode instead?

I've still resisted SSDs ... flash just ain't built to last forever.

I know the industry uses purpose-engineered magical flash substrates with lotsa write-cycle capability, and highly sophisticated caching/wear-leveling algorithms, and the statistical MTBF values appear roughly comparable to HDDs, and the whole bloody world (even - especially - the enterprise/server computing sector) uses SSD without significant hitches or hangups, and performance is phenomenal, and power/thermal advantages are impressive, and storage capacities are damn huge, and old Moore's Law keeps on dividing the price-per-GB into smaller and even smaller increments ...

But ye just can't teach an old nerd new tech. My Barracudas still throughput massive MB/s, my homebrewed watercooled DDR2 RAM-cache drive eats data faster than anything merely mechanical, my also-homebrewed bootloader flash bank approaches "instant on" speeds from cold boot to OS desktop. So SSD just seems like a flawed and problematic paradigm to me.

I feel gladly vindicated in my late-adopter Luddite anti-SSD ignorance!

Of course, I might feel really stupid if (when?) I ever get around to depending on SSD devices. It's probably just a matter of time. :(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Konrad

My Barracudas still throughput massive MB/s, my homebrewed watercooled DDR2 RAM-cache drive eats data faster than anything merely mechanical, my also-homebrewed bootloader flash bank approaches "instant on" speeds from cold boot to OS desktop.

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I, for one would love to know more about that setup you're running! I've wanted to run a RAM drive since I first found out about them, I wish they had more consumer-level adoption when they have been made for consumer machines. I just can't justify spending a four-digit figure on an enterprise RAM drive unfortunately.

Pretty curious about that flash bootloader bank too!