Chipset Z77, SSD drive and Intel RST drivers

[idata]

Hi All,

I recently built a brand new PC with CPU Intel Core i7 3770 and motherboard Asus P8Z77-V. I decided to opt for a SSD as boot device, using a traditional mechanical HDD for applications and storage-intensive tasks. Operating system is Windows 7 Ultimate x64. The Z77 SATA controller is set to operate in AHCI mode. The SSD is a Corsair Force GT 60 GB.

All went fine, until I decided to drop the MS generic AHCI driver and install latest Inter RST (11.2.0.1006) instead. After doing this, the system became terribly unstable: in most cases it would freeze in just a couple of minutes, with HDD LED always lit, operating system frozen (only mouse pointer moving, could not do anything else); in some case this resulted in a BSOD with spontaneous reboot of the PC. The freeze/BSOD events happened regardless of the specific activity I was doing (most of them actually happened performing basic tasks such as watching videos on Youtube and surfing web pages with IE9).

I tried to update everything I could (motherboard BIOS + SSD firmware), but things actually got worse (the freezes started to happen even before the operating system could complete boot).

At the end I was left no choice other than performing a secure erase of the SSD and reinstalling Windows. Since then, I've left the MS generic AHCI driver, and the PC works just fine.

Anybody experienced similar issues? Is there some workaround, or shall I give up and stick with MS AHCI driver?

Thanks for Your help!

[Allan_J_Intel1]

Hi there!

Have you tried the latest supported version of Intel® Rapid Storage?

Try testing version 10.8

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=20624&ProductFamily=Chipsets&ProductLine=Chipset+Software&ProductProduct=Intel%C2%AE+Rapid+Storage+Technology&lang=eng http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=2101&DwnldID=20624&ProductFamily=Chipsets&ProductLine=Chipset+Software&ProductProduct=Intel%C2%AE+Rapid+Storage+Technology&lang=eng

Thanks

Allan.

[BF_]

That's a good question. It also brings up another one: why are the 11.x versions thus far "unsupported"? That is, why is Intel releasing 11.x versions only for specific motherboards (though they install on anything) and keeping 10.8 around as the "official" version?

[CFran6]

Here is another question: why are there even newer 11.x versions which could not be downloaded from Intel but could be found on several other places on the web. For example the RST release 11.5.0.1171 reportedly fixes at least the CSMI pass-through regression. SMART and related functionality should work again (see ).

[BF_]

That one's easy: 11.5 is still beta. But 11.2 and earlier are not.

[idata]

Hi Allan and thanks for Your response.

I did as You suggested and downloaded the RST drivers, version 10.8.0.1003. Just the time to reboot the PC and I got the first freeze. After half a minute the PC "came back to life", just in time to restore the MS AHCI driver.

If it can help, the freeze was traced in the Windows Event Viewer, where I found an error with the following description:

"The device \Device\Ide\iaStor0 didn't respond within the expected time" (I'm traslating from the Italian version of Windows, the actual English message could differ).

Now I'm back with the generic MS AHCI driver and the PC behaves normally.

Best regards,

Filippo