A weird thing happened with a 3 year old Dell Optiplex and a new SSD

I swapped the old hard drive in a client's Optiplex 3070 for a 500GB Samsung 870 EVO, cloned it, and it booted fine. But the system kept freezing for 2 seconds every minute, like clockwork. Turns out the SATA controller mode in the BIOS was set to RAID ON from the factory, not AHCI. Switched it to AHCI and the freezes stopped completely. Has anyone else run into this on a Dell business machine that seemed too new for that kind of issue?

4 comments

4 Comments

claire_davis312mo ago

Check the SATA mode first on any Dell you work on. Saw this exact thing on an Optiplex 3040 last month, same fix.

logan6582mo ago

Seriously, that's the first thing you check every single time?

hayden_craig9512d ago

Funny enough I actually read something about this exact problem on a tech forum a few weeks back... Some guy was going crazy trying to figure out why his brand new Dell wouldn't boot past BIOS. Turned out it was the SATA controller mode set to RAID instead of AHCI. Easy fix once you know about it but nobody tells you that upfront. Definitely one of those things you just have to learn the hard way or hear from someone else. I keep it in the back of my mind now whenever I touch a Dell machine.

dylan_brown302mo ago

My buddy learned that the hard way, @logan658.