Plextor PX-256M5M and Acer Iconia W700 incompatibility?

larsras
larsras Member Posts: 31 New User

Hi

I have the Acer W700 with 128GB msata Toshiba SSD. Just bought a Plextor PX-256M5M and installed in the pc. Seems not to work well. I managed to install Win8 on the disk but it took about 10 hours. Everything related to the disk is going extremely slowly. After installation i can't boot into Win8. It tries, but just hanging, and some times after a long time, a win8 fatal error screen appears.
Inserting the Plextor disk in a USB box, and running some disk tests and benchmarks shows no problems at all. I'm able to use the disk as a standard USB3.0 disk.

Called Plextor support. They just say i ran into a compatibility issue and they can't help me. FW/Bios is the latest on in both SSD and PC.

Anyone with some ideas here?

br Lars

Best Answer

  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User
    Answer ✓

    Replacement sdd received and now it is working :-)

Answers

  • jason2234
    jason2234 Member Posts: 85 Troubleshooter

    so is the plexor drive in your acer w700 but is running slow or in a different machine all together?

  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User

    I have not had the plextor disk in another pc and used it as primary disk. As i was not able to boot at all on the plextor, then I just re-installed the original 128GB toshiba in the W700, and mounted the plextor in a external USB box, and did some successfull testing. I belive that the disk i fully functional, at least in the USB box.

    Looking into spec it seems that the plextor and the crucial m500 are using a new Marvell controller and the Crucial m4 an older Marvell model, so maybe i should have bought the m4, as people have successfully used that in the W700. 

  • jason2234
    jason2234 Member Posts: 85 Troubleshooter

    i have the plexor in my acer and have found no issues with it at all. Its speeds are very impressive.

     

    did you install windows from the Acer recovery or from windows discs?

    I found when i re-installed off the Acer recovery discs the partitions used weren't the standard for windows 8 (4 parition setup) only after i installed from windows discs did i get the right setup and the best performance.

  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User

    I installed from the acer recovery. I don't have other source for Win8 installation. But you were able to get an installtion usable still, using the acer recovery? I'm not.

    I have just found an old Sony Vaio first gen i7, and replaced the disk with the plextor (using a msata->sata adapter board). I managed to make a Win7 installation on the disk. Although the step "Expanding Windows files" took about 30 mins, which i think is not normal, but the installation is working. Did then run As SSD benchmark on the disk. Got about half the performance of the 128GB toshiba, but that is probably due to the slow Sony PC.

    So i guess the disk is working, just not in the Acer W700 combination here. 

  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User

    *****... The Win8 product key on the W700 is not usable for retail win8 versions. Tried to download the win8 iso from MS site, but the product key is not accepted :-( So stucked on the Acer recovery i guess.

  • jason2234
    jason2234 Member Posts: 85 Troubleshooter

    where from microsoft are you downloading it. are you sure youre not downloading the 8.1 preview from the microsoft site?

     

    This version requires a seperate cd key which is on the same page as the files. you can then activate this one you are in windows.

    Belarc advisor will tell you your cd key then after the install is complete you can activate over the phone or wait for windows 8.1 full release which will have online activation setup. I have my Acer oem cd key working on windows 8.1

     

    you can create a bootable eufi usb stick using a tool called refus which will load all the files onto a usb stick for you.

  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User
    The microsoft site requires me to download a small program. When i launch this it asks for my product key, and finally tells me that that this can not be used for a retail version. Quite sure it is win8 and not 8.1 as i have already downloaded and installed 81 on a friends pc some days ago. I'm not going for the 81 before it is public released, and and see some well working W700 systems :-)
  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User
    Next discoveries:

    The disk was removed from the old sony pc, with a valid win7 installation on, and inserted in the W700 again.
    For disk test putposes i downloaded the Win81 preview iso, and burned a dvd.
    Shortly after having pressed Install, a pop-up appeared asking for a media driver, like some hw was not recognized. As i did not know about any driver i just pressed on the browse button. A list of drives appeared: DVD, a X: drive and local disk. I browsed the DVD and X: drive without any problems, but when i selected the local disk (with the win7 installation) it just hanged for minutes before showing me the root of the disk. Selecting one of the directories also resulted in a long hang period.
    So again something in my opinion points to a kind of incompatibility of this disk and the W700.

    Still need to find Win8 disk to try a clean win8 installation.
  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User

    This has evolved to a kind of diary from my side...

     

    Now i have managed to clone the original disk to the plextor disk (clonezilla). THis time by having the original disk in a USB dock and the plextor mounted in W700 (oppesite was tried some time ago with disk not working as resut).

    I can actually start in Win8 now, but... The system hangs for about 5 seconds, everything freezes. Then i can use it for maybe 30 secs, and the freeze appears again. THis sequence  just repeats. Actually i saw something similar when the disk was mounted in the old SOny PC, but just thought it was due to the PC (as it has other problems, and was on the way to the garbage can). I will consider if i shall try to return the disk as faulty.

  • jason2234
    jason2234 Member Posts: 85 Troubleshooter

    i would say you have a disk issue as you have concluded. I didnt have any of the same issues you had it just worked from the go i only had the issue that i had to reinstall windows 8 from srcatch.

  • larsras
    larsras Member Posts: 31 New User
    Answer ✓

    Replacement sdd received and now it is working :-)

  • jason2234
    jason2234 Member Posts: 85 Troubleshooter

    good to hear. glad it worked out in the end

This discussion has been closed.