W510 Solid State Drive (SSD) Gets Stuck Causing BSoD. Why?

[Al_M]

Hey guys, this has been a problem for a while now, and it is really mind boggling ... I have a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 laptop with a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD drive. Ever so randomly the drive just hangs, the LED light that the drive is trying to load something stays "ON" for up to 5 minutes or so before it finally goes into a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). Once it goes into BSoD the laptop reboots and it gets stuck on the ThinkPad motherboard logo, eventually it will display "ERROR 2100: HDD0 (Hard Disk Drive) initialization error (X)" Where X is usually 1 or 2, sometimes 3 but rarely. It will not function again until I physically turn it off and back on using the power button.

A little bit of background about the problem, this is my 3rd Crucial 256GB M4 SSD, Crucial has been very helpful and they went as far as replacing the drive twice, i am starting to highly doubt its a drive issue, I think it could be something from the laptop itself. To be more clear, my laptop has also been serviced back in March (Motherboard was swapped as well as keyboard), parts failure. It was all done in very timely manner and everything was OK after the swap.

A representative from Crucial told me that this is a classical problem with the SATA controller driver handling TRIM, he said the drive is getting stuck in an infinite TRIM state which causes the BSoD, after that the drive goes into some sort of a "panic" mode to protect itself and doesn't function again until a full power cycle. (thus the need to turn off and then on the laptop) he also added it could be fixed by installing the correct SATA controller driver.

I have tried to use the default windows SATA controller driver, and I have tried to use the Intel one too, and it seems to happen less often with the windows drivers, but overall, it happens at least once a day. It is really frustrating and I am not able to get anywhere with it.

Any help or advice is highly appreciated. I am considering getting rid of the Crucial SSD altogether and just using Intel SSD instead, but I am really doubtful that it is the SSD's fault especially that its the 3rd one I use. I also know a couple of friends who own ThinkPads with Crucial M4 SSD inside them, and they seem to be working very well for them.

Thanks in advance,

Al.

[ThorsHammer]

Have you read through http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Solution-C300-Disk-Freeze-ups-in-Windows-7-solved... ???

What OS are you running?

[Al_M]

Thank you for a quick response! I am using Windows 7 Professional x64. I have applied the registry edit to Intel's LPM as mentioned in the thread you've posted. I guess I never came across it because it is for the previous model C300. Thank you again for pointing me to it, I will wait a day or two and see if the system still crashes, if it REALLY works, then you have just solved my 3 months long struggle! I'll post again in few days!

I also just ran a Cyrstal Disk Mark bench before and after, and it seems the fix did increase the read and write speeds by about 10 to 20 MBPS each. Interesting...

Al.

[Al_M]

Hi again,

Ok so I have applied the fix you have mentioned above, and it did improve (lower) the frequency of the problem happening. It really improved a lot significantly when I uninstalled the Intel drivers and used the Windows 7 built in SATA controller drivers.

However, ... it still happens ... less frequent, but it still takes place, my SSD still gets stuck at least once in 3 days now, or once in 2 days (after severe testing) and the same scenario happens. I am really stuck at this point, and not sure which direction to take.

Any help would really be appreciated, if you have / know any method to debug the BSoD's I get and a way to locate the source of the problem I am willing to go through it 1 by 1 and solve this problem before deciding to finally just giving up on the drive altogether.

Sincerely,

Al.

[ThorsHammer]

Sorry, I don't have any other advice.  It's a shame the Crucial drives aren't more reliable.

[ColonelONeill]

I'd probably try installing a fresh copy of Windows on a second partition and seeing if the problem occurs there.

[Al_M]

I'm experimenting on a fresh new install as it is. There is really not much to this install other than loading Windows from the Lenovo Backup Partition. Would anyone know how to debug the BSoD code? Or look at the event log or something to try and diagnose what is causing the problem?