[SOLVED] 10.7.3 Very frequent random freezes

[Mettiu]

I am experiencing a very weird problem with my installation, which was absolutely stable until 48 hours ago. It was not giving me any problem, yet since the other day, suddenly, it started being almost unusable.

First, a brief description of my system:

 

 

GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 Rev.1.0

Intel Core i5 2500K

RAM Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 DDR3 PC3-12800 4GB x2

Galaxy nVidia GTX480SuperOC/1536MD5

SDD HDD Crucial m4 CT128M4SSD2 - where the OS and apps are installed

RAID of 2x Hitachi 0S03191 [2TB SATA600 7200] - where data are stored

 

The system is running 10.7.3 and the bootloader installed is Chimera 1.9. SMBios is set to MacPro 5,1.

I always let it run for weeks without a reboot and I have not done any update or modification to it, just the other night it freezed once, and since that it keeps freezing randomly and often, in less than one hour uptime I would say.

I thought it might be the well-known freeze connected to the FERMI cards, as also I cannot get AGPM running properly. I have modified it using Plist Edit and according to kextstat it is loaded, yet it does not report any message about its activity in the console.

Since I was not able to solve this AGPM problem, I thought to do a try turning off my nVIdia card.

So I unplugged its power, and from the BIOS I set to use i5's integrated HD3000 instead.

The system loads correctly and its animations are obviously just slightly less fluid than before, but it still freezes.. so it must not be a problem connected to my videocard and AGPM I guess.

I was watching a flash movie while it freezed: the video stopped, I could not move the mouse pointer, nor could access remotely to the computer via iphone. Yet the audio was still working, and I could hear the movie going on.

 

I have no clue about how to solve this problem, any help is really appreciated!

Thanks in advace!

[iLeopod]

I would use the GTX 480 as the HD3000 is more complicated to get working. The GTX480 a I now has no "Fermi freeze" problems. When using the discrete GPU be sure that the Intel IGP is completely disabled in BIOS. If u can't get AGPM working u can just delete the kext but this will result in an bigger power consumption.

 

Also check if your SSD firmware is up to date.

[Mettiu]

You solved my problem!!! I could not imagine it was related to a bug in the SDD firmware!!

 

From Crucial website about Firmware update:

• Correct a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time. The drive will recover after a power cycle, however, this failure will repeat once per hour after reaching this point. The condition will allow the end user to successfully update firmware, and poses no risk to user or system data stored on the drive.
  

 

Which was exactly my problem.

I updated updated its firmware, and now it is everything fine again.

Really, really, really thank you!!