My Corsair Force GT nightmare Options

[my-cool]

It's Friday afternoon and waiting for after-work drinks to start, so I thought I would quickly share my experience this week.

During the week I bought an SSD, Corsair Force GT 240GB. I made a stupid mistake, and it is not the first time, I decided to buy it without doing any background research. I thought if I get the top of the range model and corsair brand, how could i go wrong??...

It was delivered in about 1.5days from PCCG, I installed it into my PC and ran a fresh install of windows 7 64bit. About 1 day in the problems began. I finished installing my usual apps plus windows updates and powered off the PC. The next time the PC booted no drive were found. I reset the CMOS, switched sata cables and ports and managed to boot into windows only for a BSOD to occur and then again, no drive could be found. I spent countless hours Flashing bios, installing the drive into another PC and formatting thru another OS and then putting it back and installing win7 again. More BSOD's, random crashes in windows, random reboots and drive not being found.

I finally lodged a warranty claim at PCCG and took it back to swap it over. At 1am the night before driving in to PCCG i finally did some research to find that out of the two controllers used in SSD's, sandforce is notorious for problems and BSOD's and disapearing when booting up. I also read that the Crucial M4 using the marvell controller is very reliable. So when I was at PCCG I asked for it to be swapped with the M4 rather than another Force GT. The warranty team at PCCG had to test it before doing the swap and found it faulty straight away.

Since then I have installed the M4, installed windows, run windows updates and starting gaming it up - and it runs AWESOME!!


if only i had done my research in the first place...

...I'm off to drinks now :P thanks for reading

[aliali]

sandforce is notorious for problems and BSOD's and disapearing when booting up.

Nothing wrong with the sandforce controllers with a decent firmware update which a bit more research would have found.
http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=107770

Also do check your mobo bios is up to date because some Bios updates have fixed some SSD issues, not only to do with Sandforce controllers.


This post has been edited by aliali: Jun 15 2012, 08:51 PM

[my-cool]

Nothing wrong with the sandforce controllers with a decent firmware update which a bit more research would have found.

Also do check your mobo bios is up to date because some Bios updates have fixed some SSD issues, not only to do with Sandforce controllers.

I did mention above that one of the things I tried before returning the SSD to PCCG was flashing my bios to the latest version, it didn't help one bit, another thing I tried which I forgot to mention was that I attempted to update the firmware on the Force GT using Corsair's FW update tool. It did not even recognize the drive, so there was nothing I could do.

And I don't think you can say there is "nothing" wrong with sandforce controllers when forums like this exist: http://forum.corsair.com/forums/tags.php?tag=bsod

[osama_bin_athlon]

I've been running a Corsair Force 3 120G SSD for a fair while without any problems whatsoever. you just scored a faulty drive, by the sounds of it - it happens.