Some time ago I bought a new Samsung SSD for my Laptop running Kubuntu. Everything seemed to work well except the fact that the system started freezing randomly. I was not able to figure out why it freezes or what triggered this behavior. After some research I came to know that this is a common issue and has to do with to high ‘pressure’ on the SSD. This pressure can be lowered by disabling NCQ. Be aware: Disabling NCQ may have a small performance impact on your SSD drive.

What is NCQ?

NCQ is a technology that lets drives re-order the order in which read and write requests are serviced. See this brilliant serverfault.com answer to get more information on this technology.

The solution

To get rid of the above mentioned problem, you’ll have to boot with an additional boot option. Just follow these easy steps:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”” with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="libata.force=noncq”

sudo update-grub

Now, you should be able to use your ssd as intended.