BSOD 0x000000F4 - Occasional momentary hangs, BSODs. Suspect SSD

Enabled verifier, but that was first after the previous post. Here are the dumps from the crashes that happened since.
During the first two, the computer didn't undergo any usage, but did for the third one.

koolkat77 said:

Do the following:

1. Make it sure that the storage controller is set to AHCI in th BIOS
2. Reseat the sata and power.
3. Run chkdsk /f/r, following the option two of the tutorial Disk Check
4. Seatool for dos: SeaTools | Seagate download
   Burn it in a blank cd. boot from the CD, click on "Accept", wait for it to finish detecting the drives, then in the upper left corner select "Basic Tests", then select "Long Test" and let it run.
5. Since you already updated to latest firmware, no need to do that anymore.

BIOS already set to AHCI. ran chkdsk, gonna do the seatool test later today.

However, in some previous research I found that nForce shipsets apparently have problems with AHCI and SSD for some reason (my MoBo runs nForce 980a SLI). Some people recommend running the Microsoft AHCI controller drivers instead of the nForce drivers, a solution I think worked for me previously. Don't know if this can cause this kind of problem anyway, even though the drivers aren't installed?

smarteyeball said:

The F4 error is common amongst SSD error codes.

Yes, apparently.

smarteyeball said:

Have you checked to see if you have the latest firmware?

Hopefully it's a firmware issue, but it could also be indicative the drive itself is faulty.


Be prepared to back up and RMA the drive.

Yes, I've installed the latest firmware.
My options seem to be narrowing down to RMA, if we don't find a solution

You pretty much answered yourself about the drive. Yes, it's bad. The F4 bugchecks are caused by c000000e errors during page faults. This error means that a drive (usually storage device) that was attempted to be accessed did not exist. I've seen this commonly occur with drives which are having issues, or a motherboard that is flipping out or doesn't bode well with a drive installed. It's no coincidence that this happened just after you installed the new SSD.

RMA the drive, and cross your fingers. SSD drives have a higher probability of failure than HDDs, and it heavily depends on vendor. Cheaper knockoff brands have higher failure rates, as well as OCZ. Intel, Crucial and Corsair don't seem to have as much trouble, but problems still exist with em. Given we're dealing with newer flash-based memory, it's about as usual as getting a bad stick of RAM (which isn't that uncommon).

Thanks for the deeper insight.

If I understand you correctly, the problem can also reside in the motherboard? I guess I will find that out if I RMA the drive and the problem persists (provided I don't get another faulty one).

Sometimes mobos can have compatibility issues with SSDs which can be resolved by a firmware update on the SSD and motherboard driver and BIOS updates. It sounds like you've already gone that route, however. There may also be just a bad motherboard that doesn't actually play out until an SSD drive was installed. It's not as common as a bad drive, but it can occur. However, given that this has been occurring only with your SSD drive, it's much easier to blame it than your mobo.

SeaTools DOS Long test: Passed

Just so you know that Seatools is not a viable source for testing SSD drive stability, as much as I wish it was.