Z170 Extreme 7+/Samsung 950 PRO Freezing

ArcaneFeenix wrote: Thanks for your replies. I didn't get any emails about them so I apologize for the delay. I want to preface this reply with I have resolved the issue completely and it is a very strange cause. But first, I wanted to follow up with your questions. Now onto the resolution. I spent the entire day trying to troubleshoot the problem. With it freezing like that, I knew it had to be hardware. There is no way software could do this (at least with my past knowledge). Since the only driver installer that would cause the crash was the NIC driver, I started by disabling both NICs in the BIOS. Tried to cause the freeze and it didn't freeze up (yes!). So, my idea was that one or both NICs are faulty (unusual but ok - maybe it got a surge). So, I enabled one and tried again. Froze. Both are bad? Left one on for the remainder of my testing. At this point, I somewhat ruled out the NICs. So, I started unplugging everything - HDDs, optical drives, my USB devices (which is just a webcam and CD printer) and booted with just the M.2. NO FREEZING. Yes!! So, started plugging stuff back in slowly. My friend informed me that he has seen optical drives cause these types of issues. so with everything plugged back in (except the optical drives), I still had no freezing. I plugged one of them in (I have two) and it froze. Ah ha! Turns out, I caused the issue myself. Because the M.2 takes up two SATA ports, I had to shift everything down and ended up putting both my optical drives in the ASMedia SATA bus. Turns out that the ASMedia SATA bus does not support ATAPI. I have since moved the optical drives back to the Intel SATA ports, re-enabled both NICs and disabled the ASMedia SATA bus and there has been no freezing at all. What a pain that was and I caused it all myself by trying to keep everything plugged in and making sure that my SSD and HDDs were on the "good" bus. Thanks for the help and time. Brandon

I'm glad you figured it out. I don't recall if you told us previously about the optical drive being connected to an ASMedia SATA port. Yes, normally no ATAPI support with the add on SATA chipsets like the ASMedia or Marvell. Would we have related that to the freezing you had? Probably not, but we've learned something from this.

I'm guessing you installed the ASMedia SATA driver. You could try the MSoft AHCI driver, or try setting the ASMedia SATA mode to IDE. I don't know if that will work. I can't believe I'm talking about using IDE and NVMe on the same board at the same time.

Can we say it was the 950 Pro that was freezing? No, not a problem with the SSD at all.

Don't worry about replying sooner, the forum's email is not working, you're not the only one not getting emails from this forum.


Edited by parsec - 19 Jan 2017 at 5:11am