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Thank once again for the recommendation Krogoth. XD

I'm still not entirely sure either, as the array worked fine on the 3570k... then proceeded to die on my 990FX.

I'm considering this may be because I have three drives in a raid array and not two or four?

So I'm updating this once again, two days ago my computer locked up due to a CRC error on the new drives and then got in a reset loop where it started corrupting the drives more and more, so I had to do a reimage. Unfortunately Acronis decided to spruce up my image back ups and in doing so deleted my primary images and I'm left with nothing but incrementals so I suffered a complete data loss. (If anyone has experience with undeleting .tib files, I'm all ears... I've tried a lot of different data recovery utilities to no avail.)

My new drives after the RMA still exhibit the same characteristics of the first. The're slowly getting worse over time and are starting to throw more and more CRC errors. I'm guessing that because they're running at SATA 3 instead of SATA 2 these errors are much more common and AMDs chipsets deal with such errors differently then Intel. Instead of continuing to operate the array and tolerating the error, it shuts down the array to prevent more errors (because it thinks there is a problem) and in doing so causes more data corruption then if it just kept on working.

I did a complete reinstall because of this, I'm now using Windows 8 and the errors are still present there (I've had a few lockups in W8 already). I ended up turning off write caching on the drives, which makes them perform like ass just to avoid corruption when the array decides to throw a fit. Doing more googling it seems like these errors become more common as Samsung SSDs age (830s, 840s, and 840 pros). Most people don't notice them as they aren't in a raid array, but it seems to happen on both Intel and AMD chipsets.

I don't think I'll recommend Samsung SSDs anymore. Despite all the praise they've gotten (in benchmarks) this has turned into more then a headache for me

I've had CRC errors with my Samsung 830 which disappeared when I moved back to Windows 7 from Windows 8, which led me to some investigation, and I narrowed it down to the Intel RST drivers, which have become (IME) flaky as of late. I would get all sorts of CRC errors and whatnot, but running any diagnostic from outside Windows amounted to "everything's fine", and in the end it went.

I still get a rarely occuring "RAID array reinitialization" (can't remember the correct wording), which stalls the box for a few seconds, but quite obviously, I'm simply not running an array, and once again, googling pinpointed this to the Intel RST stuff.

It sounds like a nasty combination of a software and firmware issue. SSDs aren't HDDs. RAID ecology is build around HDD, so the aching issues with SSDs isn't that much of a surprise.

So I'm going to once again update this with awesome news... I ended up with another reinstall. I bought brand new cables from Monoprice thinking that the cables I had been using were free with motherboards that had only sata 1 or sata 2 devices on them. In other words, they weren't designed to run at sata 3 speeds. I don't think that should matter, but considering all the BS I have went through with these drives it couldn't hurt... Well I was wrong.

I installed the new cables and upon rebooting my perfectly fine working PC (up till that point) Windows 8 BSoD'd with a frowny face and gave me the dreaded bad_system_config, which is basically what you get when your computer is beyond fubard. I of course spent the next four hours trying everything I could to fix it, which did nothing constructive. Apparently there isn't a F8 menu in W8 and you have to get into their special little menu thing, which wasn't popping up before the BSoD for me. I finally got into it using the installation disk and ended up in a windows repair loop which I couldn't exit no matter what I did (It constantly failed too).

A command prompt chkdsk /r said everything was a-ok. SFC /scannow with offline directories didn't function properly and just error'd out.

Now what I don't understand is my PC has worked fine for the last week, I've rebooted multiple times, yet simply changing the cables out to new cables completely **** up my system. Nothing changed except the cables. It just blows my mind and I really just want to take a baseball bat to my PC right now as it brings up fond memories of the complete data loss a few weeks ago.

The only thing I can think of is these SSDs have really fragile connectors and it's easy to break or separate some of the solder points where the connector connects to the actual PCB on the board. Looking at the connector it does just look like it's simply held in place by the connecting wires, it's not connected to the case at all. That would explain why they get more and more flaky. It always seems to happen when I mess around with the SATA cables too, this goes all the way back to when I moved them from my 3570k to my 8350. I hadn't touched them since their first install prior to that.

I just finished reinstalling and it works fine (refreshing my PC would error out too). If the SSDs had hardware issues they should've persisted through the install.


What really irks me is I don't know what specifically is causing this to happen, so I can't replicate it or avoid having it happen again. Obviously it's something to do with my SSDs, but Morphine isn't even using a AMD platform or the 990FX chipset and I've read about other people having issues with Samsung 830/840/840pros that don't just pertain to a certain set of hardware. They're just ticking time bombs waiting to **** up my computer again.

I dropped $300 on these when I bought them, that's a lot to swallow for something doesn't work properly. NOT doesn't just work properly, I suffered a complete data loss because of it. I would contact Samsung support and work out another RMA, but I'm pretty sure I'd run into similar issues down the line.

Just for the record, at least in my case, the 830 isn't at fault.

And I'll have to say that your issues are really starting to sound like a PSU issue or something equally destabilizing. If you have a spare laying around I'd give that a shot.

Already did... I bought a Seasonic x650 as I thought my old OCZ psu was dying... :l

I already tried a different motherboard as I posted on the last page...

They throw less errors when I turn off adaptive read ahead as I explained before, which makes them perform quite a bit slower. After the reinstall some of my files were corrupt and I had to run a consistency check, which caused another BSoD (on a fresh install) and the CRC smart counter went up by one on one of the drives.

The computer rebooted and I ran the consistency check on the game again (it didn't BSoD this time around) and it redownloaded the corrupt files. Chkdsk said nothing was out of the ordinary. It definitely seems relatively random and only really happens when I put them under stress (such as a consistency check). I had it BSoD on me earlier tonight when I was installing sound drivers... After cleaning out the remnants of that and reinstalling them, it installed fine again.

Something else I noticed is the more and more flaky the drives get (this is getting close to what it was before one of the drives died before and the whole system was unbootable), the drive utilization goes up and it spends more and more time on tasks that should only take a split second. If you look at active time in resource monitor for instance it'll sit there at 100% on tasks that never used to use that much 'drive time'.

At this point I'd put the SSDs aside, pop in a HDD, clean install and proceed with stability testing.

I have an 830 256 GB as my system drive and (knock wood) I haven't had any corruption or data loss. Running now for 5+ months without issue. My system details are in my sig below. I wish you luck.

I know this doesn't help you now, but at your soonest opportunity, you may want to seriously consider getting away from Acronis backups.

I switched to Macrium Reflect some months ago and am very happy with it and with Macrium support.

Two little caviats that I am aware of:

1. Just be sure that you put each set of full backups into a different folder, because "keep 2 full backups" means that it will keep only two in that folder, and it doesn't care if they're different full backup files for different partitions.

2. Macrium also causes the "Windows 8 touch-capable" version of some Steam games (Civilization V, for example) to crash. For example, if you are playing a game and one of your scheduled backups kicks off (or ends, I don't remember which). I think there may be a conflict between the method that Macrium uses to send the system tray notifications to the main monitor and Direct X for Windows 8.

But these two things are minor, I can work around them. Acronis True Image has a lot of major problems and their support team has not fixed even the worst problems in the last 4 or 5 major versions of Acronis.

Note: I have no affiliation with either Acronis or Macrium, except that I am a customer of both (I still use Acronis Disk Director).

As mentioned on the last page, this is my second set of SSDs from Samsung. I had a mechanical in my computer for a week and a half when they were originally in RMA and it worked fine. Best I can tell this relates to the Samsung drives occasionally throwing CRC errors (which they do normally) and since they're in a raid array it causes it to throw a error and drop. This seems to be a issue of particular concern with Samsung too. I'm not the only one suffering from this...

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off& ... +crc+error

When was the last time you checked the smart data on your SSD BIF? Some people reported CRC errors after checking them, but they never ran into BSoDs or what not. The Samsung Magician tool can check it.

Bensam123 wrote:

When was the last time you checked the smart data on your SSD BIF? Some people reported CRC errors after checking them, but they never ran into BSoDs or what not. The Samsung Magician tool can check it.

Samsung 830 256GB Desktop C:\ & D:\ - CXM03B1Q
Samsung 830 256GB Laptop C:\ & D:\ - CXM03B1Q


All four drives report the same.

My addition here is not mean to imply you don't have problems (or to trivialize). On the contrary it would appear you have a rather complex issue.

I still bet heavily on the AMD chipset as the issue. i have been there with ssd issues as well as normal drive issues. AMD's raid is just to much of a pain.

BIF wrote:

I have an 830 256 GB as my system drive and (knock wood) I haven't had any corruption or data loss.

Just don't run several of them in RAID and I'm sure you'll be fine. I have several 830s in multiple systems, three of them as system drives for well over a year -- including my daily-use system, from which I'm posting this -- and none of them have an any issues whatsoever (and I do check SMART values from time to time). Bensam's problem looks to be something involving the added complexities of RAID and RAID drivers, and not intrinsic to just the drives by themselves (they may be at fault when used in that way, or the finger may point elsewhere, but without that combination of factors there doesn't seem to be a fault).

Aye, the first motherboard I had was the 990X and that had the same issues before I sent it back and got a 990FX which still had the same issues (I thought it could be the chipset or the motherboard).

Morphine mentioned having issues because of the Intel RST software (but the correlation could be reversed too). Other people online look to be having issues that don't run it in raid so I don't know if it specifically pertains to AMD and their raid drivers or even running them in raid (the correlation could be reversed again). Running drives in raid definitely stresses them a lot more then simply running them as a single AHCI drive.

I had no problems with running them on my 3570k in raid 0, but they were completely brand new at the time and they ran half as fast. As I mentioned, toning down the raid read ahead (which about halves the drive speeds) results in less CRC errors. I also didn't check the SMART data till I started having issues and that was after transferring them from the 3570k. So I could've had CRC Errors on the 3570k and just didn't know it.

But if this was simply a compatibility thing why would my OS decide to corrupt itself randomly the other night when I swapped out the cables? Last time around one of my 830s died completely and another was pretty flaky before I RMA'd them.

Either way, this is a pretty big thing if these drives aren't very stable being run in raid. It'd be nice if there were other people running these drives in raid so I could compare experiences with them.

Bensam123 wrote:

As mentioned on the last page, this is my second set of SSDs from Samsung. I had a mechanical in my computer for a week and a half when they were originally in RMA and it worked fine.

As this has been going on since before March 7 you may be better off throwing in the towel on these drives in RAID 0. Sell them and get a 500GB SSD. I realize you won't push as much data per second as the SSDs in RAID 0 but I really don't see the point in that when your total array is less than a measly (lets be honest) 400GB and moving data on/off that array is limited by USB 3.0/GbE/slower storage/etc anyway.

Actually what I was thinking dude. So I'm probably going to end up RMAing these again and hopefully I can convince Samsung support with enough crying that my predicament warrants being sent two 256GB 840 or 840 pros. Otherwise I'll probably sell the three new refurbished drives and get two Corsair Neutrons, which seem to be the next best thing. That or Intel 335s, but those are more expensive (same with the OCZ Vector).

It's either that or wait till haswell comes out and then upgrade again to a newer computer. I'll lose like $100-150 on the SSDs if I sell them and buy 256s and that's pretty much how much I'd lose if I sold my 8350 and upgraded to haswell (if prices are about the same as they are now for a new system, which they usually are). Samsung SSDs really are the primary go to right now, it's quite sad that mine have behaved so poorly. It's funny too cause I haven't had a lockup since this morning when I first installed windows... but it's just waiting, lerking, till I think everything is fine and dandy to **** everything up again (which is really what surprised me when I swapped out simple SATA cables).

So a bit of a interesting tidbit, that may be worth mentioning. I had the side of my case off while all this is going on and you can here a very quiet 'hiss-chick-chick.... hisss-chick-chick sound' coming somewhere on the motherboard close to the CPU socket. When I put it under load this shifts to a highpitched hisssing sound. I'm not sure if this relates to this particularly or not. When I was attempting to OC my 8350 unsuccessfully, my motherboard was emitting a even louder and more noticeable hissing sound, especially while under load and even while not under load. This was particularly prevalent when I had LLC at very high, my motherboard for some reason was not even bootable on extreme (regardless of current to the processor or other settings).

I would say this may be indicative of a bad board or simply coil whine, but I already replaced the board with a different Asus model and chipset just to be safe... I've already dumped so much money in this through vampire transactions and such (rmas and sending a board back even to amazon costs S/H and time) that I don't want to spend more and get a Gigabyte or something just to test this out.

You said you did basic troubleshooting steps on page 1 but I didn't see you explicitly mention testing ram or dropping down to just one chip and testin with that. Did you eliminate the ram as a possible source of problems? You also mentioned overclocking attempts in the past, is your bios running default values or with tweaked memory settings or other stuff?

You've spent so much time on the obvious stuff, maybe it's something seemingly unrelated that's jacking you up. You did motherboard, SSDs, os reinstall, psu swap. What's left? Bios, CPU, ram, running in amd raid versus using software raid, expansion cards, optical drive. You may have tested these already but in the chance you haven't, figured I'd mention them.

Yeah, I already ran memtest overnight... I suppose I'll do it again just in case. That could definitely cause stripe corruption.

Failed OC settings had nothing to do with the corruption. I had the computer and it was doing these things about two months before I decided to OC it. I tried that like two weeks ago without success.

Bios is up to date... all drivers are up to date including the raid drivers. Processor is really the only other possible cause, but I'd assume if it was messing up my raid array it would be at least throwing prime errors (Which it doesn't).

I don't think you can try software raid on the primary disk... There doesn't seem to be a option to set it up when you're first installing windows. Although that would be a interesting alternative to bios raid. Last time I tested it the performance was pretty poor and cpu usage pretty high for software raid.

Bensam123 wrote:

Samsung SSDs really are the primary go to right now

I'll stick with my 960GB M500.