Vertex LE behaving strange

Senture · 2 Sep 2010 at 21:59

Got one of these on Tuesday, but been having some issues with the drive. The OCZ flashing utility refuses to flash the drive. It writes 814 blocks of data to the drive and reboots as expected, but the drive still remains on the stock firmware. Has anyone else had this problem with the drive?

Also, I have had to reinstall Windows 7 twice on it because the system became unresponcive and refuses to boot after a restart. After doing a full disk scan, it detected bad sectors on the drive. This really shouldn't happen on a drive less than 48 hours old should it?

ThomasTheTankEngine · 3 Sep 2010 at 00:02

That's weird.

What firmware did it ship with? Because I recently got the older version of the vertex (ocuk were selling them cheap) and it arrived with the 1.6 firmware already on it.

Senture · 3 Sep 2010 at 00:10

The drive shipped with 1.0 on it. 1.05, 1.10 and 1.11 all fail to flash to the drive under every OS and on 2 different machines.

I submitted a support thread on the OCZ forums, but haven't had a reply in nearly 2 days.

RavenLunatic · 3 Sep 2010 at 01:33

What motherboard and SATA controller are you using when flashing disk?
Are you running the flashing utility as admin?
Are you flashing in ACHI mode?

If you are not able to get the drive to flash to at least 1.05 FW the drive will most likely fail rather quickly. Turn off any Hard disk power saving features in windows and disable S3 sleep state as this will cause the drive to fail also.

Senture · 3 Sep 2010 at 03:47

RavenLunatic said:
What motherboard and SATA controller are you using when flashing disk?
Are you running the flashing utility as admin?
Are you flashing in ACHI mode?

If you are not able to get the drive to flash to at least 1.05 FW the drive will most likely fail rather quickly. Turn off any Hard disk power saving features in windows and disable S3 sleep state as this will cause the drive to fail also.

Motherboard is from a HP XW8400 using the 5000X chipset using an Intel ESB2 SATA host controller.

The flashing utility is run in Administrator mode, forgot to once and it didn't detect any drives.

Tried flashing in ACHI and IDE mode on XP, Windows Server 2003, Vista and Windows 7. No luck at all.

I don't bother with using sleep or power save settings on my computer. It gets switched on in the morning, used all day then off at night. But the need to update to 1.05 is a major problem. None of the firmwares (1.05, 1.10 and 1.11) will flash to the drive at all. Either I can wait for it to die, or return it under the DSR to OcUK and pay £40 for the same drive or £30 for the Vertex 2E

Bane · 3 Sep 2010 at 08:06

You might get a faster answer from OCZ forum. There might be some information on there about flashing in a certain order, but webpages taking too long to load up for me.

Looks like you can run a newer firmware than 1.05. As firmware 1.11 is listed as all Sandforce drives:

This updater covers all OCZ Sandforce based drives, this includes Agility2, Vertex2, LE. Agility2E, Vertex2E etc

freddie64 · 3 Sep 2010 at 14:24

I would RMA it now.

If it is faulty i don't think flashing new firmware will fix it.

RavenLunatic · 3 Sep 2010 at 19:00

Flashing problem is probably due to some incompatibility between the updater and your SATA controller. Do you have access to a more mainstream intel motherboard? You could RMA it directly to OCZ and get them to update it to the latest firmware. Have you asked OCUK customer services if they would be able to arrange to flash the drives for you?

Senture · 3 Sep 2010 at 22:29

RavenLunatic said:
Flashing problem is probably due to some incompatibility between the updater and your SATA controller. Do you have access to a more mainstream intel motherboard? You could RMA it directly to OCZ and get them to update it to the latest firmware. Have you asked OCUK customer services if they would be able to arrange to flash the drives for you?

No I don't. My Dad keeps buying these sodding HP workstation machines for silly money and they are quite useless.

Not asked OcUK to flash the drive for me, I can't see them being willing to do that.

reygjabla · 5 Sep 2010 at 10:42

Senture said:
No I don't. My Dad keeps buying these sodding HP workstation machines for silly money and they are quite useless.

Not asked OcUK to flash the drive for me, I can't see them being willing to do that.

OCZ support staff will do it for you. Just PM Tony or Ryder in the OCZ forum.

Senture · 5 Sep 2010 at 22:11

reygjabla said:
OCZ support staff will do it for you. Just PM Tony or Ryder in the OCZ forum.

Managed to borrow a laptop for a short while to attempt flashing. It worked successfully, now on 1.11

Looks like these drives do not like server chipsets

reygjabla · 6 Sep 2010 at 09:39

That sounds good. Now. run HDD erase before re-installing your OS.

Senture · 6 Sep 2010 at 12:14

reygjabla said:
That sounds good. Now. run HDD erase before re-installing your OS.

Bit too late for that, but I can still do it. Is it really needed? I restored the drive from a back up which did a full drive format before restoring.

reygjabla · 6 Sep 2010 at 21:11

Speed is much better if you do a secure erase before re-installing or re-imaging the drive.

Senture · 6 Sep 2010 at 21:53

I see what you mean now. I thought the OS felt a little slower, benchmarks are down by 1/3. I'll do a secure erase of the drive soon then restore the image. Might actually reinstall since the image was from a larger mechanical HDD and the partition alignment may be off.

Thanks very much

Senture · 7 Sep 2010 at 11:19

reygjabla said:
Speed is much better if you do a secure erase before re-installing or re-imaging the drive.

Completed doing this earlier on. Speed has improved but it is still a lot below what it was, but I'm not fussed. At least PC has stopped reporting that the drive is nearly at supernova (was reporting 128 degrees C before the flash).