Solid State Disks are currently a hot subject. More and more computers users are starting to add SSD drives to their systems. Some mainly for the OS with a HDD to accompany it for cheap storage, others have switched to SSD as their main storage. The SSD drives make their computers considerably faster as SSDs have no mechanical parts unlike HDDs which have spinning platters with a read/write head moving above it. Still, SSD is a relative new technology and when reading forums SSDs seem to suffer from a 'freezing' problem. When you google 'SSD freeze' you will be amazed about the amount of result. When it happens applications are not responding, the HDD acivity led remains lit but it's possible to move the mouse. Even Also Apple users suffer from it and the Intel forums are full of people complaining about the issue.
From what we gather the issue seem to be mainly related to AHCI, a standard from Intel. This standard can be compared to the IDE standard used before on many HDD/ODD devices, but AHCI makes hot plugging and native command queuing possible. However there seems to be an issue with it and a commonly used fix is to disable it in the BIOS and use IDE instead. Some SSD vendors also released firmware updates which seem to fix it, but not all.
We would like to know if there are more users who suffer from this SSD freeze and if disabling AHCI helped for them. Please post if you have the problem or if you solved it, together we'll fix this forever! We'll continue to cover this subject as long as required.
