I recently installed a new Intel 520 series SSD in my Thinkpad W520. I didn’t notice any issues for the first few weeks until I started running 2 virtual machines at once. There was a stuttering (or freezing) every 60-90 seconds for about 10 seconds.

Taking a look at Perfmon, I found the Disk Queue to be very high – during the freezing the Max Queue was up over 3500. There is a relationship between current and average queue explained here, but a good rule of thumb is that a length of 2 per disk is reasonable. Any more than that for an extended period and there is a disk bottleneck.

How to stop the solid state drive from Freezing

Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) is the culprit, specifically LPM (Link Power Management) and DIPM (Device Initiated Power Management). Both are recommended to be enabled as they lower power consumption on SATA devices that support it, but in certain circumstances they may cause freezing, stuttering and other undesirable performance degradation.

In order to turn off LPM and DIPM, insert the text below into notepad and save the file as LPM.reg and run it or download the file and unzip. The following disables LPM/DIPM for all SATA ports on a machine. If you only want to disable for a specific port, delete the other keys below. This will work for any SSD experiencing stuttering or freezing while using Intel RST drivers only (MS Default AHCI not included). Make sure you restart after you’ve run the registry file.

After you’re done, the Intel SSD Toolbox will show a warning in the system tuner (screenshot below), this is normal. You have intentionally disabled LPM/DIPM, do not click “Tune!”.