OCZ bigfoot and haswell intel chipset issue

Glanza · 17 Sep 2013 at 19:16

Hi guys, got my replacement bigfoot back from OC today. Ghosted the temp drive onto this and that was fine on a test rig at work.

Plugged it in at home on the intel sata ports (where all my sata devices are connected) and the pc took ages to boot and I couldn't read any info on the drive.

Checked event viewer and it was full of the following:

The IO operation at logical block address 4f2f0 for Disk 2 was retried.

Plugged the bigfoot into the other sata ports (asmedia) and so far it seems ok?
PC boots speedy like it was, can open steam and fire games up and that all seems quick enough for the ssd.

Is it just a issue with intel sata controller on haswell or is the drive faulty?
Not sure whether to return this and change it for a kingston hyper x 480gb.

wazza300 · 17 Sep 2013 at 19:21

there are issues apparently with sandforce drives and haswell intel sata ports

idk when the fix will come along,either firmware or bios update

DrBombcrater · 17 Sep 2013 at 22:30

The Sandforce 1xxx controller used by the OCZ is known to be incompatible with the Intel SATA controller on Haswell motherboards. Nothing you can do about it except move the drive to the ASMedia ports, where it should work fine.

Apparently the fault lies with Sandforce's firmware not strictly adhearing to the SATA spec and Intel has changed their SATA controller is such a way that it can't cope with whatever the SF controller is doing. Sanforce need to do a firmware update to fix this, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.

Glanza · 18 Sep 2013 at 17:57

Does it only effect the bigfoot series as my win8 install is on two ocz ssds in raid 0 and that is fine.

Those are vectors though.

wazza300 · 18 Sep 2013 at 17:59

vectors are ok cos its an indilinx controller,not sandforce

jeffa123 · 19 Sep 2013 at 13:30

I have to laugh at this controller issue with Haswell because most SSD's use the Sandforce 2281 controller, even the Samsung drives, just that the Samsung drives come with an Arm9 controller as well. The problem is not with the drive but with the motherboard controller. Because the Haswell Motherboard Z87 chipset is wholly 6GB/s instead of like the previous Z77 controllers which employed both formats. Perhaps with the use of Windows drivers rather than Intel drivers you will have better than most issues addressed. Sometime the The AHCI goes a bit over the top through hardware controllers rather than OS controllers.