Salient Soft

This was done in order to resolve ongoing reliability issues with the OCZ Vertex and SATA port errors from the P6T as detailed here.

This post also follows on from my earlier post here concerning hot swap issues, where I went into some detail of the P6T flashing process. Reference should be made to that post for more details of P6T flashing.

The following steps were performed:-

1. I identified the current firmware version of my OCZ Vertex. To do this start device manager, find the disk under Disk drives, and open its properties. Then select the Harware Ids property and the version number of the firmware will be shown. There were hints in the forums of a more detailed revision number, but I could not find it. My initial version was 1.5.
2. I also tried to run the OCZ Toolbox which allows identification and upgrade of the firmware, and also auto downloads the correct new version. I nice idea if it had worked! In my case it failed to find the OCZ Vertex either before or after the upgrade process.
3. I did note that a number of posts suggested switching the SATA mode to AHCI in both the bios and windows. This OCZ post details the process, which (for the windows part) simply involves changing the value of HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Start in the registry from 3 (=IDE mode) to 0 (= AHCI mode). However, when I tried this at this stage, the system froze at boot time. Fortunately, I was able to switch the setting back in the BIOS, boot into safe mode, and set the registry setting back to 3, to restore the system to a working state.
4. The latest version for my Vertex was 1.7, but it is not possible to upgrade directly from 1.5 to 1.7. It is necessary to upgrade to 1.6 first. Finding all the historical versions of the firmware is not easy on the OCZ site – the main download area only has the most recent version. Older version may be found from a forum post here which has all the historical downloads.
5. For my Vertex, here is  the 1.6 upgrade and here is the 1.7 upgrade.
6. Note that as per the 1.6 upgrade, I had the ‘filename error’ which meant that I had an older version which needed a destructive upgrade to 1.6 due to a change in the NAND/wear levelling algorithm. This would mean loss of all data on the drive and a restore afterwards, and the use of a different kit for upgrading. The upgrade also could not be done with the drive in use as the system disk. The links in the previous paragraph give all the instructions and the alternative versions of the upgrade.
7. I then made 2 full backups with Acronis, plus another daily file backup, to be sure I would be able to restore the drive.
8. As per the instructions, I jumpered the drive to set it into standalone/upgrade mode, and booted from the previous version of Windows 7 which I still had available on a standard Hard drive. I kept this available just in case, and on this occasion I was very glad I did.
9. The destructive upgrade is available as 16_win_vertex.zip. Unfortunately the zip contains 2 versions of the update, 641102VTX.exe and 661102VTXR.exe. There are no release notes to say which version to use or what they are (!) I wondered if they related to the internal firmware/drive version from which you were upgrading, but I didn’t know that either as I have said earlier. Another forum post hinted that as may be expected, the 661102VTXR.exe was a later version and the ’R’ indicated revised. I decided to try this one.
10. Having jumpered and rebooted, the drive correctly identified itself as YATAPDONG BAREFOOT, and I proceeded with the upgrade, which went successfully.
11. I then immediately upgraded from 1.6 to 1.7 using 17_updaters_1.zip.  This time, a standard non-destructive upgrade could be done (not that it mattered in my case), which mean burning an ISO on a CD, and booting that to do the upgrade. The zip contained ISOs for a number of OCZ products plus some release notes this time, so I burnt the ISO for the Vertex. I booted it and did the upgrade, which went with no problems. One point is that I cannot recall whether I removed the jumper on the drive before or after this final upgrade. I am fairly sure that it was after, in which case the upgrade does not mind whether the jumper is present, but if there are any issues it should be tried without the jumper present as would be normal for a non destructive upgrade.
12. Following this, I booted the system. Initially it could not see the Vertex, so I rebooted into the bios, found it was then visible, and did a bios save and another reboot. This time the drive was visible but not formatted.
13. I then booted Acronis from its rescue CD and restored the backup, plus the Master Boot Record. This proceeded normally.
14. After rebooting, the system came up and ran fine, however it did present the boot manager from the other disk, and the system had to be selected from there. To prevent the need for this, I copied the boot files back to the new SSD using bcdboot as per this post here. It was also necessary to reset the boot order in the bios so that the SSD was chosen first, otherwise the boot manager is still presented even after you have run bcdboot.

Now I had a working system with the updated SSD, I decided to reflash the P6T as well. Previously I had had hot swap and SATA issues with later bios versions, as detail here. However, since then I had disabled the onboard JMicron controller which was giving problems, and replaced it with a Startech controller, as detailed in the update to this post here. Therefore, the original issues which were preventing the use of a later bios were no longer present, so I opted to flash to the latest version which at the time of upgrade was version 1408 :-

1. I used the in-bios EZ-Flash, and the process and precautions are detailed in the original section of this post here.
2. I re-applied the required motherboard settings as per the process, and rebooted successfully.
3. I then retried switching into AHCI mode, as detail above when I tried it prior to the upgrade. This time it worked correctly with no problems. In the bios, I just set the onboard SATA to AHCI. The JMicron controller was disabled, and the Startech controller was not touched as this was an add-in card just used for SATA backups. It is possible that now either the onboard ICH10 SATA or JMicron SATA might work and hot swap reliably in eSATA mode with AHCI enabled, but as I was happy enough with the Startech I decided to leave this issue well alone for now.
4. As a final test, I re-ran the Windows Experience tests to see if AHCI had improved performance, and indeed the primary hard disk figure had increased from 7.1 to 7.3, which is good considering the fact that my original OCZ Vertex is now an old  technology which has been set to End-Of-Life by OCZ. The system certainly felt snappier, but this is highly subjective as I had not run before and after benchmarks – the goal of the whole excercise was reliability rather than speed.

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Update 24/3/2011 09:08

The event log reported an error on boot today (after a very slow boot with a long blank screen), seemingly for SATA 3 again (unless I am still confused about how the port mapping works)!

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2

This is very strange as SATA 3 is no longer connected, so it appeared to be winging about an unused port. It is possible that Windows interrogated the port on boot and got an error even though nothing was connected, but it is still a bit weird. No immediate action has been taken – will monitor over the next few weeks.

The next step would probably be to add a new PCI express SATA controller and disable all the onboard SATA completely. This Startech controller offers 4 internal and 2 external ports, and needs a pci express X4 slot. It would therefore fit in the spare pci express X16 slot in my P6T, as pci express cards with less lanes can fit happily in a larger slot and use it partially. At the time of writing it is available from Lambdatek for around £66 inc VAT. It appears to get very mixed reviews, although my experience with startech has been good. A search did not reveal any other obvious cadidates for a reasonable price – just some higher end raid ones which also seem to have fans so hot and noisy as well as pricey!

Update 7/2/2011 12:54

I examined the event log again over the last few weeks and new errors were present for SATA 3:-

Error, Event 11, Atapi – The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2

This appears to be a new problem affecting the Samsung 1TB data drive. The drive has therefore been moved to SATA 6 and will be monitored over the next month.
It is still not clear whether these issues are due to one or more faulty cables or to faulty ports on the motherboard. The next test will probably be to swap the cables for new ones and monitor again, as this is much easier and cheaper than a full motherboard swap. Given that a single cause is more likely than multiple independant failures (unless a whole batch of cables were faulty or of poor design), a fault on the motherboard looks most likely for all the issues.
As multiple disks have now been affected (The Vertex and one of the Samsungs), at least it does not appear to be a fault with a particular device.

Update 7/11/2010 8:33

I examined the event log and the drive error has not occurred since before moving the cable to port SATA 5 (last occurrence of error was 2/11/2010 at 9:51)
Therefore my conclusion is that either port SATA 1 on the motherboard is faulty, or there was a poor connection, or a faulty cable issue which has been rectified when the cable was moved.

I may try some further tests – perhaps moving back to port SATA 1 with a new cable to further narrow down the issue.
I will check again in a couple of weeks for any errors and perhaps try a further test then.

The good news is that the evidence does not point to a faulty OCZ Vertex drive.

I have had occasional drive errors logged, as follows :-

Error, Event 11, Atapi – The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

It appears that this error relates to SATA 1, the OCZ Vertex, although the mapping between the event and the actual disk is hard to establish. There are Microsoft posts on how to do this here and here, however they do not use the same disk/port designation as above so they are not all that helpful.

The problem could be the drive, the motherboard controller, or the cable. To start to diagnose it, as at 12 noon on 2/11/2010 I have moved the OCZ Vertex onto Port SATA 5 with the same cable. I will monitor the issue and try further diagnosis over the next few days/weeks and post the outcomes here.

IF I do have to replace the existing OCZ Vertex (should be under warranty though…) there is now a Vertex 2 which is faster, and also a Vertex 2e which reduces the overprovisioning in the SSD. This overprovisioning is the area used for read-modify-writes/block cleaning where a block is swapped for one in the overprovisioning area. It is also used for wear levelling and bad block replacement. See here and here for for a discussion by AnandTech on this. See here for a  review of the Vertex 2e and comparisons with the Vertex 2.

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Update 4/4/2010

Whilst hot detection has been working, I was unable to run a backup as Acronis gave errors. A disk check with windows failed to complete intermittently on one of my drives. When I disk checked the same drive afterwards via USB, it checked out with no problem.

I’ve finally taken the decision to dump the internal eSATA on the P6T. Whilst my PC is an Arbico one under return to base warranty, I will not be returning it. I may have a hardware fault, but so many other people are reporting problems with the P6T and eSATA that it is impossible to be sure. I do not wish to be without my PC for a week or 2 only to have it returned with the problem still present.

I have disabled the JMicron controller in the Bios, and installed a StarTech 2 Port PCI Express eSATA card (Silicon Image 3132 chip).  I bough mine from CCL Computers for £20-78 including VAT and postage, so not much more than it would have cost me to courier my PC back to have it looked at under warranty, and it took me 10 minutes to install. So far this is performing flawlessly. When installing on Windows 7, Windows Update found the driver and auto installed it – the bios on the card was 7.4.05, and Windows installed version 1.0.15.3 of the driver. This version did not appear to be available when I searched the Silicon Image Site – the CD with the card, and Startech’s site, both had version 1.0.15.0 of the driver, so I stuck with what Windows did and had no issues with it.

Having already used a card with a Silicon Image Chip, I immediately installed HotSwap! as this allows safe removal of the drive. As installed, the driver does not enable safe removal in windows, but does enable write caching on the drive, so HotSwap! is recommended. After installing HotSwap!, remember to ctrl/click the systray icon – this will allow you to specify those devices which are to be excluded from hotswapping, such as your fixed hard drives. HotSwap! is designed for Silicon Image chipsets and is able to optionally spin down an eSATA drive on removal. It can also scan for hardware changes if you have hot detection problems (I did not). The only slight issue with it is that it will not autostart in the tray under Windows 7 as it gets a UAC prompt to continue when it starts. You can get around this by making it start as a scheduled task with high privilege, but I just leave it on the quick launch bar or superbar and start it manually when I need it, and put up with the extra click.

Update 10/3/2010

After reverting the Bios back to 1004 as at the end of this post, a couple of reboots later the pc failed to detect a hot insertion again. I reverted the JMicron driver back to 1.17.53.0, the version used by the poster referred to below, as this was cited as stable, but still no joy. I tweaked the Bios to disable the floppy drive (on by default) as I don’t have one, resaved and booted, and then it all worked again. After 5-10 more warm and cold boots, it is still hot detecting fine. I don’t think the floppy controller was the issue, but the fact that I went in and changed and resaved the Bios settings, as this has kicked it into life in the past.

My final conclusion – it does run stable now, but I wouldn’t call it rock solid – it still won’t detect an eSATA drive present at boot time, and I’ll need to keep an eye on things to see if the detection problem resurfaces. If it does, I suspect just entering Bios setup and resaving the Bios settings after a small change (or even no change) will sort it!

Original Post 9/3/2010

My P6T was delivered with bios revision 0904, and as delivered would not hot-recognise or safely remove an eSATA drive (safe removal was off, and write caching was off which obviously impacted performance).  I installed the latest JMicron jmb36x Controller driver (1.17.55.0, 27/01/2010) , and this enabled write caching and safe removal via the system tray. Note that whilst the P6T has both jmb363 and jmb322 controllers listed in the spec, the controller under windows lists as a jmb363, and this driver appears to handle both the above chips, therefore the jmb36x driver is the correct one. Upgrading the driver in my case affected eSATA hotswapping/safe removal etc. using both the rear eSATA port on the P6T (jmb363), and my front port connected to SATA_E1 (jmb322).  However, hot recognition was very intermittent (even with a device rescan) and the only way to consistently recognise the drive was to have it plugged in at boot time, enter the bios, exit the bios and boot. It would then recognise the drive at boot time once only, and could be safely removed (but would need booting to recognise it again).

This post states that bios version 1004, plus the JMicron driver I was using, sorted the problem. As there was now also a later bios version, 1201, I reflashed the P6T to this version. I used the flash utility in the Bios itself as this was convenient, and it would recognise USB flash drives to read the new bios. There is also a recovery process if it crashes during flashing, which involves booting with the target Bios in the root of  a usb flash drive in which case it auto flashes (see manual).  However, this recovery process only  works with small FAT32/FAT16 flash drives of less than 8GB, so I prepared a 2GB flash drive especially in case this was needed. Note also that the Bios flash utility does not do long filenames and so converts them to DOS 8.3 format – if you have multiple Bios file versions on the drive this may mean you won’t be able to tell which is which, so rename the files to sensible short names before you start, and save yourself another reboot! Also be sure to unzip them.

It turned out that version 1201 did not work at all with eSATA, so it appears that Asus fixed this in version 1004 and then broke it again in 1201 – doh! I even tried a CMOS reset with 1201 just to be sure, but it still did not work. With the drive present at boot time, it just froze during the JMicron controller drive recognition phase, just prior to starting windows.

I reflashed back to 1004 and hotswapping all worked fined, both recognition and safe removal, including multiple times. However, the drive would not be recognised at boot time if present, and would still freeze as before. As my real goal was true hotswapping, I was happy to live with this issue as hotwapping was fine – I just plugged the drive in later after booting.

Prior to clearing the CMOS, I took shots of all the Bios screens with the old settings in, to be sure I did not miss any custom settings, as the PC had been built by a custom builder, Arbico. Whilst there is a Bios feature to allow saving and restoring of CMOS settings to a flash drive, there was the concern that reloading old settings could introduce old data which did not match the new Bios, so I wanted to be sure to load default settings and tweak from there.

The screen shots of my old settings may be downloaded in this zip file. Afterwards, I manually made the following changes after clearing the CMOS and loading new defaults :-

Menu: AI Tweaker, Setting: Ai Overclock Tuner, Value: X.M.P.

Menu: Power options, Setting: boot via keyboard, Value: set to Ctrl/esc

Menu: Power options, Setting: Power On via PCIE devices, Value: enabled
(This setting was needed to allow Wake On Lan to work correctly)

Menu: Boot/Boot Device Priority :-
1 SATA: PM-SAMSUNG HD
2 CDROM:SM-Optiarc D]
3 DISABLED

Menu: Boot/Boot Configuration settings, Setting: Full Screen Logo, Value: disabled

Menu: Advanced/On Board Devices Configuration, Setting: High Definition Audio: Value: disabled
(Onboard audio was disabled as I was using a separate sound card)

Menu: Advanced/USB Configuration, Setting: Legacy USB Support, Value: Enabled

Menu: Tools, Setting: Asus Express Gate, Value: Disabled

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