Recently, I posted about the new SSD drive I have for my Lenovo W520 Core-I7 smokin’ fast notebook computer (OCZ Vertex 3)  Clearly I was in the honey moon period because everything seemed blazingly fast. However, reality set in and the computer started hanging, refusing to boot all the way, have pregnant pauses, etc.  I called OCZ tech support and they suggest reload a fresh version of windows (now that’s a big help!).  I then posted to the Lenovo forums asking for advice on anything special I need to do when reloading. Instead, I got what seems to be the answer to my problem from a user by the name of “Gan” from Norway.

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/Need-to-Repave-my-W520-with-Windows-7-Ultimate-Use-Vanilla/td-p/439787

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I finally got home from a long week of travel, did a full backup of my computer just in case the registry hack failed, and applied the registry fix discussed in the article here:  http://geekmontage.com/texts/ocz-vertex-3-freezes-locks-up-stutters-and-crashes/.

I can say, after using the computer for a few hours, I have not had one hickup.  I’m hoping it stays that way.  For anyone else who thinks they have the same problem, here are some of the issues I was having:

  1. W520 would boot slowly and about 1 out of 5 times hang forever after reaching the logged in screan (wait cursor when hovering over startbar)
  2. Outlook would hang in the middle of typing messages, often for more than a minute
  3. Eventlog errors referring to location iaStor
  4. Visual Studio 2010 would get really slow and hang
  5. Many others

Here is what my current stats look like.  This is a newer version of CrystalDiskMark so it may not be comparable to the previous version I ran.

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For the moment, I’m a happy camper.

Important Update 5/13/2011: …/nasty-problem-with-ocz-vertex-3-ssd-on-lenovo-w520-solved/

Let me get the fireworks out of the way first so you don’t need to wait for the numbers

 

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For those that don’t know what these numbers represent, let me tell you, this is a screamer!  The W520 actually supports the SATA III interface spec which goes up 600MB.  I was wondering if it would actually work and I have to say, if it’s showing Sequential reads of 472.2 MB/second, it must be working.  The drive holds 240Gig and currently costs about $600.

In contrast, the drive I had before in my Lenovo W520 was no slouch.  It was a 256Gig Patriot Torqx M28.  The numbers are below run from the same Lenovo W520 computer.

 

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Just by way of comparison to a rotating disk, my configuration in the Lenovo W520 is I put my boot drive (the SSD) in the slot normally used by the DVD and I put my data disk (mydoc’s, etc.) where the normal built in disk goes.  I’ve got a 750GB Hitachi drive that simply rotates platters around (but costs less than $100).  The numbers are not quite as impressive.

 

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And for those of you that like graphs, here is the Sequential Read Speed by Drive

 

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And a computer very similar to mine:

 

 

I’m hooked, hope are also now.  Hard to go back to read and write speeds of .5 MB/second.


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