Intel 520 SSD Laptop Issue

[cbuchach]

I recently moved my Intel 520 240GB SSD to my wife's laptop. I used the Intel software to copy the image from her 320GB drive to the new SSD. Everything worked great and the system seemed to be working fine.

She immediately started getting blue screens and the system would not start up however. I had to take out the battery and put it back in to get it to restart. I then set the BIOS to provide a diagnostic display during startup and noticed that the SSD was not being detected all the time at cold boot. For example I started it up this morning and it first didn't work. I powered off, then on and the drive was detected and the system started.

I tried reseating the SSD and otherwise have no idea why the drive is not reliably detected by the laptop each boot. My suspicion for the Windows blue screens is also that the drive loses detection by the system.

The laptop is a relatively new Lenovo T520 that I got for her last spring. The SATA controller was and is set to AHCI. The BIOS doesn't have many other options for making SATA/IDE changes.

 

[groberts101]

set the power options to "high-performance" mode so that the systems "Link State Power Management" option is set to off. The system will consume more power but be less sensitive to certain issues like this one.

If that doesn't help?.. then the bios may have issues with that particular drive and need an update to improve compatibility.. although if it were an OCZ branded drive most here would just blame the SSD firmware itself. lol

Might be best to scour the laptop mfgrs forum(and elsewhere) for proof of compatibility with that particular SSD. Because after all.. and regardless of Intels extensive validation process.. it's still a Sandforce controlled drive and they can be flaky like that.

 

[cbuchach]

I hopefully have fixed the problem. There were actually a few BIOS revisions available for her laptop and two of them were said to fix issues with SATA detection and resume from sleep. So maybe for once in my life I found a BIOS issue with a revision that actually fixes my problem.