mSSD Hard Drive Acceleration Cache = page fault in nonpaged area

by philg

Due to the fact that the latest laptop computers don’t offer all that much more than the 17″ HP that I bought in 2012 (e.g., see “Why do laptops STILL have so little RAM?“), I decided to see if I could figure out why the old machine was unable to boot. At first I blamed Microsoft for its Windows 10 updates because the machine had died right in the middle of one. But then we discovered that the computer couldn’t boot properly even from a USB drive if the hard drive were simply plugged in. The machine would die with “page fault in nonpaged area.” I remembered that I had paid $50 or $100 extra for a 32 GB SSD cache. Hunting this animal down required a nearly complete disassembly of the machine, including removing the keyboard and top cover, a bunch of zero-insertion force connectors, about 25 screws, etc. When we were done, however, and the little Samsung board was removed from its mSATA home, the machine was considerably healthier.

I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to add an extra level of complexity to every hard drive access. Certainly the purported acceleration never materialized. The machine was slow to boot and subject to the same “I’m thinking for a while” pauses that plague any other computer with a mechanical hard drive and bloated software. I wonder if this mSSD cache ever did anything for consumers other than break computers.

I’m putting this here in my weblog for antique laptop fans who are Googling for why their computer either can’t find an operating system on the hard drive and/or dies with “page fault in nonpaged area” when trying to boot from a USB drive.

It does seem to be time to retire this beast. I had ordered a Lenovo X1 Yoga but the delivery date slipped quite a bit and I canceled it. What else is happening in the laptop world? Dell seems to be stuck at 256 GB SSDs, even for $2000+ XPS laptops. 256 GB sounds great until you realize that this the same storage capacity as an iPhone 7.

Intel has a 7th generation processor line but the devices aren’t available yet? Should one wait for the next generation MacBook Pro? Go to Costco and buy a $400 laptop then stuff in a $235 1 TB SSD?

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16 thoughts on “mSSD Hard Drive Acceleration Cache = page fault in nonpaged area”

  2. I just took delivery of a Dell Latitude 7370 and it is amazing. Super lightweight, 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD (you can upgrade this yourself to a 2TB Samsung 960 Pro coming out soon), fanless (it uses Core M5 or M7 processors which are plenty for casual use, but not for heavy duty use), and has a gorgeous screen with a tiny bezel. It also has a great keyboard, and the best speakers I’ve heard in a laptop this size (relatively speaking, let’s not get carried away, but they are surprisingly nice sounding). The WQHD resolution is actually my favourite (and unexpected) aspect — it’s the first time I’ve had a retina display on Windows, and for the most part, the resolution scaling seems to work well.

    The point of this anecdote is that everything I need is in the cloud these days, so I find that for a laptop I don’t need to carry around my entire collection of music, photos, videos, and documents dating back to the 90s. And I don’t need Photoshop or Visual Studio so I don’t need a beast.

    It turns out that an extremely light, completely silent, gorgeous laptop actually fulfils all my needs for a laptop. I still have a desktop computer with all my “stuff” on it.

    Looping back to your original problem, what specific model is the HP laptop? It may be possible to just replace the 32GB cache module with an SSD. But it’s probably not worth spending too much money on a 4 year-old laptop unless it is an amazing laptop in other respects.

  3. Back in the day when SSDs were still expensive (they are getting cheaper by the minute) I tried using a small capacity SSD as a cache drive in front of a spinner. While the SSD itself worked fine, the cache software was always buggy. The speed improvements were modest and sometimes the machine would lock up. And out of safety it was always clearing the cache if it got confused. So that whole technology was a fail and now that SSDs are cheap we can say a happy goodbye to it.

    Circa 2012 laptops are great bargains on the market if you don’t demand an Ultrabook. I just bought a used Dell Latitude e6430 on ebay for $125. You can get them even cheaper sans OS, sans HDD (which you will want to replace w. an SSD anyway). This machine is just as fast as current models, it’s just thicker and heavier because it has a DVD drive and all sorts of unnecessary slots (expresscard, vga, etc.). The market is flooded with “off-lease” business laptops. These machines are considerably more rugged than consumer laptops – magnesium chassis instead of plastic, etc. The depreciation on laptops is brutal – they lose maybe 90% of their value in 2 or 3 years, so the 1st owner’s loss can be your gain.

    Oh, and BTW, Dell designs these machines so that the back cover comes off with 4 or 5 screws and once the back cover is off, everything is accessible for upgrade/repair. I’ve never had a laptop that was this easy to work on.

  4. In answer to John’s question, yes you can get SSDs in mSATA format. There are even smaller formats out there now. My daughter’s Lenovo had an extra slot open for a cellular data card, which she doesn’t use so I was able to put an SSD in there in the 42mm M.2 format which is around the size of a large postage stamp, while she got to keep the original HDD as a data drive.

    No one in their right mind should still be booting off of spinner drives. If you are, either add an SSD as a 2nd drive (either in the M.2 or mSATA slots if you have them or many times you can swap the DVD drive for a HDD caddy) or else replace your spinner with an SSD and your old machine will be much faster. This is true of desktops too. Do it today -you won’t regret it (as long as you have a good backup routine – SSDs do not fail gracefully – they just go dead and all your unbackedup data is gone in a “flash”).

  5. Just buy a macbook and install windows on it.
    Spares readily available, easy servicing, great
    screen, keyboard and touchpad, fast SSD, etc, etc

    Sometimes the best choice is just to save yourself
    the need to exhaustively examine the options and just
    Go with the flow. 🙂

  6. Thanks for the ideas on replacing the mSSD, but the plan was removal, not replacement. The cache was a plug-in option and I couldn’t think of a reason why the computer wouldn’t function without it, especially if the HDD were replaced by a $100 SSD.

    John: Thanks for the Dell idea. I don’t want to pay more than $500 for a brand-new computer and then have to rip out the hard drive. So if I am going to buy a higher-end machine I would rather do it from a company such as Lenovo that sells full capacity SSDs at pretty close to the Amazon/Newegg prices (1 TB PCIe SSD is a $500 upgrade at Lenovo from the 128 GB default; the 1 TB PCIe drives at Amazon seem to be about $750).

    Noel: Does it make sense to buy a MacBook Pro now? I thought that they were about to release some new versions. Also, for traveling I think it would be nice to have a Yoga-style machine that could be set up to play a video. Could it be that the standard 1980s laptop design (clamshell) is obsolete? Paying $3000 for a soon-to-be-obsolete MacBook Pro that has a 1980s clamshell form factor doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea. ($3000 is the price for a 15″ version with a 1 TB SSD and 16 GB of RAM, but without the faster CPU). Wouldn’t it at least make sense to see what the next generation of Apple portable computers looks like? They can’t be spending so much time on their Social Justice quests that they have ignored the innovations of Lenovo and Dell, right? (see http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/03/30/guy-with-a-whites-only-sign-in-his-conference-room-tells-others-not-to-discriminate/ )

  7. couldn’t think of a reason why the computer wouldn’t function without it, especially if the HDD were replaced by a $100 SSD.

    Keep the HDD (you can always use more storage) and use the mSATA slot for an SSD. If nothing else, after you have moved over the contents of the HDD, you can use the HDD for automatic backups of the SSD – as I said before, SSDs have much higher MTBF than HDs but their failure mode is usually unrecoverable. With a proper SSD drive image saved to the HD you can be back where you started relatively quickly.

    There’s not a big cost difference between mSATAs and 2.5″ SATA SSD’s (the mSATA is basically the same thing without the case – if anything they should be cheaper, though they aren’t, so for the same money as replacing your HD you now have a machine with 2 drives.

    I would check to make sure your machine supports large non-cache SSDs in the mSATA slot but I’ll bet it does.

  8. Does it make sense to buy a MacBook Pro now?

    Not now and not ever. If you really wanted to run Mac OS in addition to windows you could build a “Hackintosh” out of a windows machine with identical or better specs. Apple hardware is always priced at a large premium because they contain magic Apple juju that Apple fans crave.

  9. HP EliteBook 8540W user here, with SSD and 8GB RAM (I think it can be taken to 16GB) works fine.

    A friend bought an MSI gaming laptop – though it might be bigger than what you want, they come with Nvidia graphics and up to 32GB RAM. It was $1400 with 1920×1080 screen, 16GB RAM, etc. and they threw in a custom fitted laptop backpack.

  10. Get a HP Spectre x360 at Best Buy. It is a light weight 13 inch screen laptop. It has a great resolution touch screen that can be set at any angle for viewing or folded into a Touch pad computer. Best Buy has tons of them. You can pick one up today. It is a great laptop that does everything that the Mac does or the Yoga does. Back when you said you did not like the touch pad when you tested it but I find it to work fine but I use mine mostly with a mouse. I suggest you test one again. I got mine for around $1200 with 16G DDr and 512G of SSD. I love it and it does everything I need. Here are the Best Buy and Amazon web site lists of the various versions they sell.

    http://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-spectre-x360-2-in-1-13-3-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i7-8gb-memory-256gb-solid-state-drive-natural-silver/4351701.p?skuId=4351701

    https://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=hp+spectre+x360&tag=googhydr-20&index=electronics&hvadid=118481285678&hvpos=1t3&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=894786861710680425&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_114hyfabpp_e_p13

  11. Plus if you get a light weight convertible laptop like the above you might find you can do away with many of those other devices you own. No need tor a Ipad. No need for a desktop computer. No need to try to keep the 4-5 devices synced together. No need to worry about software updates on 4-5 devices. No lugging around all those devices. I am down to just my smart phone and my small laptop computer that can fold into a pad tablet as needed. I put everything I need on my laptop. The battery lasts for 8+ hours so many times I do not even need my charger.

    I also limit what I load my phone. All the master files are on my laptop. I only keep subsets of my contacts and music and photos on my phone for walking around.

  12. Thanks, Bill. I didn’t dislike the HP x360’s touch pad as a touch pad. The problem was that I kept hitting it inadvertently with my palms while trying to type. Apparently I am too clumsy!

  13. Don’t know your needs very well, but I love my MacBook Air. I think they’ll let you return it if you don’t like it. Very polished laptop and fine for web browsing. Not that expensive, either.

  14. Maybe wait until the next Macbook Pro, then buy the previous one for less money. They’re the official laptop of the mobile app boom. Like all Tim Cook creations, the next version will probably get some dual camera or lose the headphone jack but nothing substantial. Write it off as a business expense, of course, then vote for higher taxes.

  15. If the form factor is a deal breaker for you, then so be it.

    But otherwise, I think Macbooks are still pretty good. They are in fact price competitive once you find other models that are in fact comparable with all of the other features beyond the obvious CPU/RAM/ScreenResolution.

    I have my suspicions that Apple have been ignoring CPU upgrades because the latest Intel CPUs are just not that much of an improvement in a laptop.
    Hence Apple have, up till recently, completely ruled the roost in providing the best available SSD, which actually makes much more difference to perceived performance.

  16. The apple products just haven’t been kept up, the pro is basically 3 year old specs. The new ones (when they materialize) will be hideously overpriced and my observation is the older models don’t drop very much in price.

    If you want a thin/light machine that won’t break the bank, buy a chromebook. I have an i3 15″ unit that I got for $170 as a refurb. 12 hour battery life, plenty of performance for chrome browsing/apps.

    I do recommend buying a cheap upgradeable machine and putting your own SSD and ram upgrades into it. My ex just bought this 17.3″ lenovo laptop for $269 on sale with visa checkout. Its actually getting tough to find easy to upgrade laptops as many manufacturers are mysteriously dropping the access panels for ram/ssd.

    http://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-300-17isk-17-3-laptop-intel-core-i3-4gb-memory-500gb-hard-drive-black/5450868.p?id=bb5450868&skuId=5450868

    I put a 480GB SSD in it that I got for $190, and an extra 4GB of ram was about $16.

    i3 with hyperthreading, 480gb ssd drive, 8gb dual channel ram for about $500 total with easy upgrades that were under a removable panel, two screws. Unless you’re going to do an awful lot of high end video work or cad/cam stuff, its plenty of computer. Only downsides are that the build quality is good but not great, and the 1400×900 screen. Battery life is middling.

    Compared to her former machine, which was a 5 year old Gateway 17″er with a 240GB SSD, 6GB if ram and a first generation i3, its a screamer. About twice the cpu power, around 5-10x the graphics performance, uses less than half the electricity running full out, and the battery life is a lot better than the gateway was in its prime.

    Those m.2 ssd cache devices were actually pretty good performance improvers. However the device had to be properly configured in the bios, it needed the right drivers, it has to be configured right in windows and as you’ve seen they’re good for about 5 years in a heavy usage situation before they start giving errors. The idea is to cache most commonly read portions of the main drive and to temporarily cache read operations. Many more modern “SSD/HDD gamer drives” with 500MB-2TB+ platter drives and 8GB-32GB onboard SSD storage offer performance about halfway between a platter drive and an SSD.

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