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I am running Arch Linux on an HP Mini 1000 with a SSD. The machine is a little under a year old and fairly heavily used.

About a month ago the machine started freezing up. During the freezes, the system is almost completely unresponsive, seemingly especially for disk-intensive tasks such as launching an application for the first time since reboot. The disk activity led is always constantly illuminated during the freezes. After somewhere between 30 sec and 3 minutes, the machine returns to normal operation.

I am pretty sure that the SSD is the source or the problem. Iotop reports a disk transfer rate of 0 during the freezes, so I think it must be getting "stuck" and simply not performing any r/w during the time.

I can't seem to find any information on these symptoms on the Internet, so any input on exactly what might be the cause of this would be greatly appreciated. The machine is under warranty, but I would rather not deal with HP until I actually know what is going on.

Thanks.

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  • What does dmesg say?
    – Bobby
    Jun 1, 2010 at 13:36
  • You use an OS which uses it as a HDD. What is the question? :) You have to pay the price for such things. (If really the SSD is the problem.)
    – Apache
    Jun 1, 2010 at 13:39
  • Which SSD is it? Many of the early drives were notorious for freezing and stuttering. I've also experienced a problem with freezing on my Intel X25-M G2.
    – sblair
    Jun 1, 2010 at 20:25
  • I cannot seem to find the make/model on the drive (cracking it open is not a feasible option-- no easy access). This is making checking for firmware updates/images from the vendor impossible, though I did check HP's website and they list no relevant updates for my machine. Googling reveals that at least some HP Mini 1000s shipped with San Disk drives, but San Disk's site says that firmware updates should be aquired through the OEM. The output of dmesg is the following: pastebin.org/299687 Afaik it has nothing useful in it.
    – SamsLembas
    Jun 1, 2010 at 21:59
  • Please see my answer here: superuser.com/a/925725/176001 . This is typically the problem and the solution :)
    – Ninj
    Jun 9, 2015 at 15:08

3 Answers 3

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See if there's a firmware update for the SSD. Make sure the update doesn't erase data on the SSD before you apply it. ;)

Are there any management tools you run on the SSD? Does it support TRIM? If so, you'll have to TRIM it manually. Check out Wiper on http://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/files/ to help you with this. Make sure you have the latest HDparm as well.

I have an OCZ Vertex in my Macbook Pro, and I have experienced this type of problem several times. Sometimes, the SSD is unrecoverable & needs to be re-flashed with it's firmware, then reformatted & restore backup. I think the culprit is the SSD is over-saturating or over-heating the bus controller (usually Southbridge).

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  • I cannot use Whiper due to it not supporting XFS. Having trouble with everything else because, as I added above, I can't figure out the make/model of my drive atm. :/ Thanks anyway.
    – SamsLembas
    Jun 1, 2010 at 22:18
  • Try smartctl -i /dev/sda as root, where sda is your SSD. This should at least give you the device model & serial number so you can look it up.
    – churnd
    Jun 2, 2010 at 10:50
  • No luck. The most specific it gets is 'PATA SSD 32GB' and a serial number (5DF807950C7D00026916). I did notice that it supports SMART but it is not enabled. Will try enabling that and see where that leads later.
    – SamsLembas
    Jun 2, 2010 at 14:06
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After a few more days of I started getting input/output errors several minutes after boot (this was seemingly caused by a certain amount of disk usage after boot). At this point I called hp. The tech told me to shut down my computer, unplug it from everything, remove the batter, and hold the power switch for 10-15 seconds. He claimed that this "removed any built-up static in the machine". Surprisingly, this seems to have done something. The freezes still occur, but much less frequently and for shorter periods of time.

However, I also noticed that, sometime during all of this, some data on the drive seems to have become corrupted. Yikes.

I'm calling this resolved, but I really expect the problems to come back soon, and don't feel like I can trust this machine to remain functional at all.

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I have faced exactly same problem for a while on Windows 7. i have found & fixed the root cause.

i have Samsung 840 series 120GB SSD on Win 7 laptop. i removed the original internal HDD with this SSD.

It is happening due to SWAP diskspace or virtual memory. If the the swap memory is enabled and that space is allocated on the SSD on the system, it happens regularly.

I just turned off the "Virtual Memory".

Problem is just gone with no performance degradation.

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  • Removing Swap isn't a good idea, because, well, OS cannot swap programs anymore - bad things will happen when you run out of RAM. And you can't hibernate.
    – gronostaj
    Dec 31, 2013 at 9:16
  • @gronostaj for usage with SSD, Hibernation highly not-recommended. as i use 8GB RAM, i practically, never run out of memory. with this issue, pc is almost unusable. turning off "virtual memory" isn't that big deal
    – kmonsoor
    Dec 31, 2013 at 9:31

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