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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