Maximum PC

My system is all SATA II based. MOBO, hard drives and it hums quite nicely.

2 weeks ago my SSD died on me and I should have just purchased another SATA II hd but in my zeal, I bought an OCZ Vertex 3 which got very high marks on more than a few websites. Of course it's SATA III.

Everything hums along as it did for years before but the first problem I was having was while I was watching VLC Player, it would just crash and the system would reboot. My O'Cing was fine for years but everything got better when I returned to default setting in BIOS plus I updated my BIOS which I hadn't done before.

Still having a problem but this time it's with Firefox. Out of no where it crashes. I do a lot of multi-tasking, my pc works quite hard.

I wanted to ask you all about my new SSD SATA III. My board is rated for SATA II bandwidth but my new drive is trying to cram twice the amount of data into the MOBO. Even though they say it's backwards compatible, still think it's creating a problem.

I am considering installing this:

http://www.directron.com/sypex40040.html

It's a PCI-E card that will create a SATA III internal and external port for my pc. It's only $15. Would this be worth getting? I don't believe in coincidences, my new SSD gets installed and all of the sudden I have problems I never had before??? It's only $15, maybe it's worth trying out?? PCI has plenty of bandwidth for my new SSD to use.

This is the MOBO I am using:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM ... 79_Deluxe/

Win 7 64-bit
AMD Phenom 3.2 Black Edition
8 gigs RAM
3 WD Hard Drives
OCZ Vertex 3 SATA III
Radeon 4890 HD w/1gig RAM


The goal is to get back that 3 year stability I had AND enjoy the new, faster SSD SATA III.

Your symptoms sound like some of the old Sandforce issues, check your firmware version on the Vertex 3, it should be 2.22, if not, update it. I would think any shipping Vertex 3 would come with 2.22, but then again, you might have got an older drive that got pushed to the back each time new stock came in...

You're not going to gain a whole lot of real-world usefullness by going from SATA II to SATA III, and the main benefit, faster boot time, will be negated by the fact that the controller card will have to be initiallized before you can boot from it. If you do get an add-in controller card, you'll need to make sure that it's bootable. Not sure if that Syba is bootable, it's not mentioned in the description or the Syba website. Either way, I'd go with a better brand: Highpoint rocket 620 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816115072 but personally, I'd keep it on the motherboards SATA II controller.

Thanks so much cha for the reply.

Why do you say to stay with the MOBO SATA II controller??? Gonna check out that link you posted and thanks for the heads up about the PCI not being bootable. Take care.

So I can learn more, what is happening when my SSD is sending 6Gb/s to my MOBO when it is only rated for 3/Gb/s???? This is why I think my Firefox is crashing here and there.

I stopped VLCPlayer from crashing by reducing my O'Cing but the last problem I have is the crashing of Firefox, which is all the new SSD SATA III.

I figure I can cure this problem with a controller card containgn 6Gb/s ports.

Well, right now I have Win 7 on two hard drives. The new SSD and one of the old hard drives. The boot loader is installed on the old hard drive and I have BIOS booting to it. It recognizes both Win 7's so when I power up, it shows both versions and gives me a choice. The newest Win 7 on the SSD is highlighted so if I don't do anything it automatically boots to it. I was hoping the same thing would happen if I plugged in the new SSD into a controller card. I'd have bios pointed at the old hard drive with the bootloader, both Win 7's would be recognized and the newest Win 7 on the SSD would boot up. What do you think??

Like I said, make sure you have the latest firmware for the Vertex 3, the Sandforce 2281 controller inside of it was plagued with bugs when it first came out, current firmware fixes those problems.

The SSD controller should be sensing that it's connected to an SATA II port & throttling the data throughput to match. I've had no problems running a Sandforce 2281 based SATA III SSD with latest firmware on an older SATA II controller. Go to your favorite search engine & do a search for sandforce 2281 problems

I say stick with the motherboard controller because there really aren't any good third party SATA III controllers that are on these inexpensive add-in cards. Also because SATA III is a 6Gbps spec while a PCI Express 2.0 1x slot is only 5Gbps.

I believe that your current setup with the boot loader on the HDD can work even with a card that doesn't support booting because technically, the HDD is the boot device which is then redirecting to a secondary location.

So what you are saying is my system will still do what it is doing now, even with a controller card. See the two systems and give me a choice which to startup with cause the bootloader is on the hard drive, yes??

Well, 6Gb/s is really about 500MB/s which is a hell of a lot better than the SATA II connections on the MOBO, right???

You know....I downloaded the latest drives for the Vertex, the OCZ toolbox and it said the flash failed!!!! What's up with that??? Got a 1-2-3 for me on how to upgrade/flash my Vertex???

I believe so, but have no way of testing it to make sure.


What firmware version is shown by the OCZ toolbox??? Fairly foolproof method is to use the Linux based tools & create a bootable CD to run the update off of. Also, they do have a pretty decent guide to follow, it's right underneath the toolbox download...

Here's the thing, Vertex 3 is a pretty decent SSD, even though it's "old tech", yet in real-world applications, it never comes close to that 500MB/sec & for the most part, you will not notice any difference between SATA II & SATA III. Sure benchmarks will show you a difference, but your perception will not. Even going from a single Mushkin Chronos 120GB in SATA II mode to dual Mushkin Chronos 120's in RAID-0 on SATA III, benchmarks showed nearly 350% improvement in read & write speeds, yet the 'working' difference was virtually un-noticeable except that Premier Pro CS5 seemed to open faster on the RAID-0 SATA III setup. Boot time is actually slower in RAID-0 with SATAIII Vs single SSD in SATA II because the RAID controller has to initiallize which takes longer than the time shaved off the Windows start up time.

The OCZ Toolbox procedure is pretty simple. You can't update the OCZ Vertex 3 if it's the C drive so I put the toolbox on the D drive. Then I reboot to the D drive which also has Win 7 on it.

It's real easy to use, I select the OCZ Vertex from the list, select the tools button, then select the update button. I get a progress bar and everything. Then it says update failed.

It's using a generic Windows driver dated sometime in 2006.

Don't even need to do that with the Linux bootable CD based tools... but you still haven't answered the question... what firmware revision does OCZ Toolbox show currently on the SSD?

Drivers are a seperate issue, & I probably should have thought of that first... you can download up-to-date drivers directly from AMD If you're NOT using RAID, then you want the top link "AMD Chipset Drivers", if you ARE using RAID, then you want the 2nd link "AMD RAID Drivers".

Hey chaosdm. Welcome to my hell.

A certain someone may notice why I haven't responded to this thread when I have his/her past half dozen.

Nah... this is a cake-walk compared to some of the people I've dealt with.

Revision 2.15.

I do what it says, I make the OCZ NOT the C drive, apparently you can't do a fimware update when it's a C drive.

So I boot to the D drive and run toolbox, get a progess bar and everythiing and ultimately it says it failed.

Pc has been running like a champ the past few hours, I've been quite happy.

Now we've established that you have an older firmware revision (current is 2.22 for the Vertex 3), we can look at other reasons the update may be failing. There are a couple of possibilities that immediately come to mind, in order of most to least likely:

1> Drivers - you mentioned Windows drivers from 2006, these are just the most generic SATA II drivers available & probably don't know how to handle tech that's 5 years newer. Update to the AMD AHCI driver I linked earlier. Even if they don't fix the problem, they will improve performance maximizing your SATA II throughput on the SSD.
2> Old BIOS version - check for newer BIOS from ASUS
3> Bad SATA data cable - swap SATA data cable
4> Bad SATA connector on motherboard - connect to a different SATA port on motherboard.
5> Bad RAM

When all-else fails, try the Linux Bootable CD, it really is the best way to go, at least from my experience. It already has more up to date drivers than Windows, so it should eliminate any potential driver issue, and it works regardless of where you have the SSD plugged in and even if you have a pair of them in RAID... or at least it does with the Vertex 4 drives.

However, looking at what 2.22 fixed from 2.15, I don't see a significant reason to update for most users...

• Improved handling on prolonged resume from partial to slumber state
• Fixed an issue when abnormal amounts of secure erases could cause incorrect block P/E counts to be reported in SMART data.
• Performance improvement on some benchmarks

This leads me to believe that your initial problem might simply be the generic Windows drivers.

Gotta give respect when respect is due, Dr. cha!!!

I did notice a performance boost when I switched to AHCI instead of IDE but two things happened. BIOS only listed 4 SATA ports and not 5 and when I booted to the Win 7 on the other hard drive, it hung up and restarted. Wouldn't work until I put it back to IDE.

Anyway, I hit my system with 5 firmware updaters. They all showed progress bars, sectors being loaded but they all showed the same, old 2.15 version when finished. One of them must have finally took cause it is running just like it used to. Running HD on big tv while surfing high speed and downloading big files. Without the update, my big download files would be corrupted when I unzipped them, like all the stuff I was doing on the pc interfered with the download. Now no problem at all.

I agree about a possible bad SATA cable. Some idiot tried to say that couldn't happen, that it's all 1's and 0's. Just got a bunch of brand new SATA III cables I am going to install this week when I tune up my pc.

Oh and Lat.......no one noticed anything about you cause no one cares about what you do. That is until you come on the forum and tell everyone (which is so weak).

Of course nobody does. But I don't care either. So that makes us even.

Oh, you don't care?? Direct quote from you:

"Hey chaosdm. Welcome to my hell.

A certain someone may notice why I haven't responded to this thread when I have his/her past half dozen."

Keep tellin' yourself you don't care. Please.

"I don't care" was used in the context of "I don't care what you think." I wanted a break anyway. I knew if I responded, you would just reply with something to the tune of what you were saying in the other threads about how your firmware is bad, how your cables suck, how your motherboard is broken, how you keep asking essentially the same question when it's been answered.

Take this as you will. You're probably just happy it's not me responding to your posts, even though I'm getting some kind of passive-aggressive vibe from chaosdm.