Just had an SSD fail on a PC I built.
Its about 5 years old, a 250gb crucial. Symptoms are windows subsystem freezes after about 5- 8 minutes. Mouse still active and any current video test loaded into the GPU will loop.
The drive will take a windows quick format, pass a windows chkdsk and will load a new windows 10 from install media, but will give the same symptoms in operation. Nothing in the windows event log. I'm guessing its an age related write failure
Last edited by: Zero on Sat 20 Oct 18 at 23:22
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If I suspected age related, before I did anything else I'd see if I could recover files. Useful to know how that works.
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How can you be sure it's the disk and not, say, memory?
Last edited by: smokie on Sun 21 Oct 18 at 08:44
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>> How can you be sure it's the disk and not, say, memory?
Steps in order of diagnosis.
1/ Remove video card and run it on on-board video - locked up after 8 minutes
2/ Remove one memory dimm - locked up
3/ swop memory dimm - locked up
4 try different dimm slots - locked up
5 format drive - reload windows - locked up
6/ stress test video card - didn't appear to lock up as fractal test busy happening, but underlying windows subsystem locked up - ie you couldn't minimise the screen.
7/ Stress test CPU and monitor temps and power - fine full screen, but windowed the monitoring prog would stop updating.
8/ Removed drive - put in another drive on same sata channel, load windows, runs fine for hours.
9/ take now suspect SSD drive and put into other machine, load windows, it locks up.
So I am confident in offering them a fix by installing a new SSD for 150 quid, but they are pondering a 50% performance increase and fix I offered them for 800 quid.
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>> If I suspected age related, before I did anything else I'd see if I could
>> recover files. Useful to know how that works.
I did, and it recovered fine as long as it was the first operation you did after power up. IE before it locked up. It would also clone to another drive ok. Read appears to be fine, write appears to be the culprit
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ooooo I may have fixed it.
Discovered it has Samsung microcode, so used some Samsung SSD tools to check it. They reported wear as good with only 18TB write use to date. I used the tool to upgrade the microcode on the controller, then some third party tools to do a secure full format, (It would previously fail on a windows full format), reloaded windows, and its been up for an hour running youtube vids.
Hmmm.
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Could you have upgraded the microcode without formatting the disk?
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Zero - try this ssd-life.com/
SSD Life - I use the free version it to check the Dell reseller we use have fitted the exact type of SSD i ask for.
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Interesting. it predicts my more expensive SSD (has been working for 2y 2m and is said to have 10 years remaining and the other two to have 9 years. The cheapo, which is just a scratch disk, has been working for 3y 4m,
I'll be happy if it's predictions are right!!
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SSD life - rtj70
