Weird Windows 8 freezes on Intel SSD

I had a very annoying problem on my Windows 8 system recently.

Once in an hour of active use system would suddenly hang for 10-40 seconds. System event log then would contain following records:

Source: iaStorA EventID: 129  Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.
Source: disk    EventID: 153  The IO operation at logical block address 9e1c5b for Disk 1 was retried.
Source: disk    EventID: 153  The IO operation at logical block address 7af577b for Disk 1 was retried.
Source: disk    EventID: 153  The IO operation at logical block address 7100db for Disk 1 was retried.
Source: disk    EventID: 153  The IO operation at logical block address 5cf489b for Disk 1 was retried.
Source: disk    EventID: 153  The IO operation at logical block address b6fdc73 for Disk 1 was retried.

and so on...

Disk 1 is Intel 520, SSDSC2CW120A310 and it is my boot drive. Motherboard is based on Intel H61 Express chip set. Lastest Intel storage drivers are used.

I'm having a similar problem, which I'm still searching for a better fix. However, I did detail a work around for Win7/8 in the Lenovo forum.

The Win 8 work around is:

1. Remove Intel's "Rapid Storage Technology Driver" in favour of MS's generic version
2. Apply registry hack to enable MS's power manger to show the HIPM and DIPM options
3. Disable HIPM and DIPM located here
4. Set HIPM/DIPM to active.

My dream is to able to use the Intel AHCI driver and this drive.

I don't have a solution, but I have a setting that makes it less painful.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\disk] "TimeoutValue"=dword:00000014

I changed this from 3C hex (60 seconds) to 14 hex (20 seconds). This means that when the I/O stack is not responding, Windows will wait for 20 seconds before issuing the reset instead of 60 seconds. My guess is that if it is too long, and there are too many I/O's stacked up, Windows bluescreens on purpose.

For me, it only happens on startup or resume from hybrid sleep on Windows 8.1. The HIPM and DIPM suggestions did not help me, nor the PCI Express LPM (Link State Power Management). I also have a normal disk, not SSD. I am running version 12.9.0.1001 of iastora.sys.

EDIT: Well now, I installed version 12.8.2.1000 of Intel Rapid Storage Technology, and now I can suspend and hybrid sleep no problem now, even though (perhaps on Windows 8, not 8.1) I had the problem with that installed.

I was able to solve this problem on my machine running Windows 7 Pro x64 on a MB that includes the Intel ICH10R RAID controller:

1. A temporary work-around is to disable the Paging Executive. Disabling the Paging Executive prevents Windows from swapping memory used by device drivers out to the paging file. The path to the registry entry is here:

   \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

   and the key is:

   DisablePagingExecutive

   Change the value from 0 to 1 to disable. You will need to reboot to put the change into effect.

2. An actual fix, as apposed to the work-around, appears to require a BIOS update. Motherboards with the Intel RAID controller (mine happens to be ICH10R, but there are others) include BIOS code for the chip. This is called a ROM option. Upgrading the MB's BIOS includes any available upgrades to the RAID controller's BIOS. My upgrade took me from version 11.2.0.1066 of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager to version 12.0.0.1783 of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel has renamed their RAID software to Rapid Storage Technology).

   Prior to updating the BIOS, remember to boot into your current BIOS and take note of every setting. Don't just write down the values in the order in which they appear. Write down the item and its value. The new BIOS very likely introduces more settings and may move some settings from one menu to another.

   A BIOS upgrade resets all the BIOS settings to their default, which usually includes the RAID controller being disabled. On your first boot-up after the BIOS upgrade, if you go to the BOOT section of the BIOS configuration screen, you'll probably see all the individual hard drives that make up your RAID volumes. Even changing the BIOS settings back to using RAID won't change what you see on the BOOT configuration page until you re-boot. So the order is, restore all your previous settings, including changing the settings back to RAID if that's what you had before up to the BOOT menu, save the changes and re-boot. Then you can continue restoring your previous settings starting with the BOOT menu.