Asus - M4A79XTD EVO - SSD/SandForce

[kwesleyb]

ISSUE: Hi all. Just in a bit of an dilemma regarding ssd's for my motherboard. I currently own a Corsair force 3 120gb ssd. I have had 1 rmaof this drive as it was causing random bsod over a period of time. Then after a few months it got to the stage where the system bsod around 20 seconds after windows booted up.

Before I rma'd that ssd I installed a fresh Win 7 onto a known working hdd and connected the ssd as just a storage drive so i was mainly trying to get my data back before i rma'd it. However when i booted windows, i could access the ssd for around 20 seconds then it "disconnected" and disappeared from being visible. On a normal reboot the ssd was seen in bios and the exact same happened everytime. During this time I didnt get a single bsod whilst this hdd was the OS drive.

Now i got the new replaced ssd last week and all was fine for the first 3-4 days until 2 days ago where i got 4 bsod in 20 minutes and randomly since then.

I have been allowed to rma this drive once more but this time I have demanded a alternative product, but this is where my new issues is.

QUESTION: To my knowledge the reason I have had these issues is that SandForce drivers in ssd's arent the best compatible with the Marvell controllers on my motherboard. I still really would like a ssd in my system as the OS drive, would a drive such as the Crucial ssd have similar issues the sandforce drives have? or should i just go back to a decent HDD until I upgrade my motherboard in the future?

Thanks.

Ps: I cant decide whether to have put this into the Motherboard or the SSD forum, so seeing as this is Motherboard related to the Marvell I put it in the motherboard forum. Sorry if people see this as incorrectly posted in the wrong place.

 

[Pinhedd]

I am not aware of any compatibility issues between sandforce SSDs and the Marvel controllers on Asus X79 motherboards but I don't doubt that they exist. The marvel and ASMedia controllers are good enough for platter drives and optical drives but fall short of having full AHCI support for SSDs. I do know that they have to be connected to the Intel controller to facilitate firmware updates at the very least.

If you have two SSDs they should both definitely be attached to the SATAIII ports on the Intel controller. Your platter drives will not be able to take advantage of the speed difference between SATAII and SATAIII so you should move them to the SATAII ports if they aren't there already.

With that said, SSDs still have a high failure rate, I had a very similar problem with a Mushkin Chronos Deluxe that was attached to the Intel controller and at the 5.0.2 firmware revision. It happens, just RMA it again

 

[kwesleyb]

Thanks for the reply. Im currently even more confused as right now I only have the 1 Corsair SSD connected. I have removed 1 IDE HDD and 1 SATA HDD and ONLY connected the SSD to the ESATA port on my motherboard and so far after 1 day I haven't had a BSOD. Here is a picture of my SATA connectors on my motherboard:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/fullimage.php?image=19618

"SB750 south bridge chip supports six SATA-300 ports allowing RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD, and one ATA-133 port. ASUS M4A79XTD EVO comes with an extra chip from Marvell that brings one extra SATA-300 port (the one that is black on the motherboard) and one eSATA-300 port on the rear panel."

I have the SSD connected on the ESATA port which is one of the two ports that face horizontally. I'd consider myself above average on knowledge with most of the components in my pc, however I don't know which SATA ports are Intel or Marvell. So I don't even know which ports are SATAIII or II here I'm afraid. Also my SATA set up is in IDE, so would it be wise to configure this to AHCI? Im aware this might need to change the registry settings within windows, however I did this on the previous SSD I had and still got the BSOD's until I sent it for an RMA, so I'm pretty sure this shouldn't have an impact on my issues.

Just for extra info on the BSOD logs, the affecting driver is NTFS.SYS and in terms of the SSD product, the Corsair forums are pretty heated in terms of unreliability, hanging and BSODing of the Force 3 SSD's. And I have experienced every issue everyone has had on those forums. I have the new revised version of the SSD drive which seems to be rebuilt (compared to the older one I had) and with the latest firmware. Also I am running the latest firmware for my motherboard too.

If this further helps, here are my pc specs which i should have added on my original post.

Asus M4A79XTD EVO Motherboard
Corsair PSU HX850W
Quad Core Overclocked 3.3Mhz AMD CPU
Corsair 1600mhz 16GB Ram
Corsair 120gb SSD IDE
2x 1TB hdd
Asus Essence ST sound card
Zotac GTX470 video card
8 Controller Fans
------------------------------------

I have until Wednesday to send off my RMA (bank holiday) so just looking around for extra information from everyone. Ive really been put off with SSD's not sure all these issues justify the performance increase. Id appreciate any extra input from anyone.

 

[Pinhedd]

I didn't read your post right at first, I thought you had an X79 chipset. The M4A79XTD doesn't have any SATAIII ports, only SATAII and eSATA which run at SATAII speeds (they're identical for all intents and purposes).

If it keeps running I would just leave it alone. Unfortunately I don't know much about AMD motherboards