Random BSOD with SSD RAID 0

Ok, so I've been testing Win7 on severa; machines and had no issue until now.

I've setup Win7 on RAID0 configuration on 2 Patriot 64GB SSDs.

For reasons unknown, Windows 7 will either lock-up, reboot, or BSOD out fo the blue. This seems to happen during times of extended, rapid writing. For instance it occurs much sooner when using Newsleecher.

This occurs with the onboard AMD RAID on my Asus M4A79T-Deluxe Motherboard as well as on a seperate SIIG SATA II RAID controller.

Any help or advice is appreciated.

It seems like the most problems is with Asus. Just saying as my sound is on an Asus board and it's not working right.

SSD's will place a very high demand on their controllers, for the two that you're running, you will need a solid chipset - ICH10, for example. That particular board comes with a SB called the SB750 Chipset. It's a value chip, aimed at lower-end systems but is still expected to be a reasonable performer. With 2 decent SSD's attached, it may be causing the problem since the SB759 was knows to crash on high-end Solaris servers that were running RAIDs.

Bryce: I've never been much of a fan of Asus. Been an Abit man for years. But with Abit having been shut down as of my most recent build, I assumed Asus would be the next best option.

Captain Zero: The trouble in my case, is that I upgraded to SSD and Win7 at teh same time, making troubleshooting a real pain. :) Your points are definately valid. I've never had much luck with onboard of "fakeraid" controllers. Sadly I don't have teh $200+ dollars that decent hardware controllers cost. If you can recommend a cheaper, more suitable option, I'd be grateful. I tried to at least find information on which controllers Win 7 had driver support for out fo the box to illiminate drivers as a liekly potential problem. But could find no info.

Since your post last night, I decieded to try and wittel the likely problems down. I've reinstalled Vista64 onto the SSDs via the SIIG controller. Applied SP2 RTM, and additional updates. Then install newsleecher and set it loose while I slept for a couple hours. Remarkably, the system didn't fail or crash. So now I'm leaning towards this issure being more Win7 specific, although as you say, it's possible that Win7 just isn't handling the controller stress as gracefully.

Again, any incite is appreciated.

It's not likely that W7 is directly causing the issue you're having since the OS has little to do with how the controller actually manages the RIAD (no matter the config). Glad to see it seems stable.. This newsreader you're using may simply be faulty or bugged in how it handles I/O. I'd run the OS as you normally would and keep a close eye on the RAID.

Under normal circumstances, I would assume the same. However, it's been essentially rock solid today under Vista with teh same hardware configuration.

The freezing/BSOD can be made to happen without using that particular program, but that that program seems to cause it to occur faster and more consistently, so I've been using it to test for this issue. Even jsut web browsing will trigger problems.

One interesting item of note, however... since installing Vista, disk response seems substantially slower than under Win7. Even slower than my traditional HDD RAID config I formerly ran under Vista. Very puzzling.

BadServo said:

One interesting item of note, however... since installing Vista, disk response seems substantially slower than under Win7. Even slower than my traditional HDD RAID config I formerly ran under Vista. Very puzzling.

That's a good clue, right there. It goes back to the issue of throughput on the controller. If I'm not mistaken, those are mlc drives and will push any controller they're attached to. That being said, the driver in Win7 may be more efficient than the Vista driver. A good thing, except when your controller is flakey.

You have three realistic options;
1 - Get a physical controller
2 - Get a board with a real controller.
3 - Try Vista drivers under W7.

Actually.... I'm using the Vista drivers under Win7. No way to install otherwise. Seems to be the case with most RAID controllers. So the hardware and drivers are identical. Again, very puzzling.

I'm looking at high-end controllers now, but it's not looking good for our heroes. I wish Windows offered a software RAID option for the system drive like Linux. I'm using a quad core CPU so I don't think the performance hit would be too bad. <sigh>

Thanks again for all the insight.

Try running the new SysInternals, and especially the DiskMon app (as admin) it will give you a good idea of what the drives are doing.

OK, done some more testing. This issue just gets more and more bizarre. Just for comparison's sake, I performed a HDTach benchmark on a few configurations to gauge performance. I installed Vista64 on a single traditional HDD. According to the benchmarks (and I'm sure this is mostly due to the crappy controllers), the SIIG Sil controller was drastically outperformed by the onboard in all tests. Additionally, 1 SSD nearly equal in speed to both of them in a RAID0 config. More importantly, 2 traditional 320GB HDDs in a RAID0 blow the doors off all the SSD configs in every area except random access time. After these results, I opted to make my final Windows 7 installation onto the 2x 320GBs.

Here's where things get odd. The system seems perfectly stable under this setup. I've intentionally stress-tested it and run operations that would cause problems with the SSD RAID and can't make it go down.

At this point, since I'd abandoned the prospect of RAIDing the SSDs, I decieded to connect jsut one fo them to the system, exclusively to install games to to decrease load times. After boot, and format of the drive, I began copying about 2GB of data to it, and the system immediately froze.

Same situation as before, writing to the SSD drive causes Windows 7 to loose it's mind whether it's single, RAIDed, and regardless of controller. This doesn't occur under Vista.

Again, I'm completely lost on this one.