Experience with Renice SSD

Earlier this year (2013), I picked up a Renice K3VLAR 1.8" PATA Zif SSD 128 GB drive from mydigitaldiscount.com. Needless to say, I was extremely excited because my Sony VAIO TXN27N was insufferably slow and needed a boost.

To start out, the height of the Renice SSD is much smaller than the original Toshiba MK1011GAH 100 GB HDD. I used a strip of thermal pad to help make up the difference, but it just "glued" itself to the metal brace in the TXN27N, which works just as fine.

After getting the hardware installed, I installed Windows 7 and things were looking up! Everything was so much faster! However, the next day, that's were the problem started. After a prolonged period of being turned OFF, turning ON the system triggered Windows to start CHKDSK. CHKDSK found lots of lost indexes, lost files, generally, lots of disk corruption.

First things first, I go to the Renice website at http://www.renice-tech.com/ for a firmware upgrade. Under Support -> SSD Update, there's an update available for Renice K3E 1.8 PATA ZIF SSD. After downloading and running the Renice K3E SSD-Firmup application, I find out that I DON'T HAVE A Renice K3E! Instead I have the Renice Z2. Weird.

So I can't update the firmware, and the Renice SSD is slowly corrupting itself. I tried contacting Renice technical support and that's a joke.

Next, I thought perhaps it's a drive block size problem. I read somewhere that Windows and the SSD might have a compatibility problem due to incompatible block sizes. On the Windows 7 installer, at the disk selection screen, you can manually reformat a drive by pressing Shift+F10. Format the drives using the following command:
format <drive letter> /a:<block size> /q

The Renice Z2 SSD required a 512 byte block size.
format <drive letter> /a:512 /q

IMPORTANT! Windows creates a System partition AND a Primary partition. Format BOTH partitions as NTFS with a block size of 512 bytes.

So far, everything is working great on power down/power up and hibernate.

To be honest, I did feel like I got cheated by mydigitaldiscount.com, but I'm going to give them some leeway, because, when I originally order the Renice 240GB K3VLAR E (K3 E) 1.8" PATA 40-Pin Zif SSD Solid State Drive for PC and Mac - RN-K3E-Z1856, but when it was "delivered" by USPS it was no where to be found. Where I live, USPS just dumps packages on the ground if it won't fit the mailbox, so I'm guessing someone in the apartment building where I used to live picked it up while walking by or USPS misdelivered it and it was never returned. mydigitaldiscount.com was nice enough to try to make it right.

And since I finally got it all working, no harm, no foul. I will be ordering from mydigitaldiscount.com again in the future, I was thinking the 2.5" PATA SSD drives.

2013-07-14 Update

I just ran into a problem where my Windows 7 install startup into a Startup Repair boot cycle. Basically, Windows 7 booted update to a Startup Repair option and after attempting to fix the startup sequence, Windows 7 booted up into the same Startup Repair option.

I reinstalled Windows 7 with the same format options above, but this time, I performed a slow format just in case. In addition, I'm turning off the Renice Z2 write caching option in Device Manager.