SSD Failing?

[barry2811]

I use a Corsair Force F60 as a boot drive (and have done for the last 2 and a half years).

Today, I went to open notepad++ and my system hung up. Mouse still worked, but nothing else responded. I rebooted and the SSD wasn't picked up by the system. Power cycling got it back and it booted fine. I tried to open notepad++ again - same thing.

I have tried browsing to the folder, reinstalling notepad++, and doing an error check of the drive - all of which lead to the same locking up.

Basically, it seems that any access to the notepad++ folder is causing the issue.

I'm suspecting that the SSD is failing at this point. Anyone agree or got any other ideas?

[kalniel]

Very odd, should be resilient to any local failure. Check with SSDlife?

[barry2811]

Thanks for responding. I'll check with SSDlife.

To eliminate any issue with Windows (admittedly highly unlikely), I just booted to a Ubuntu 12.04 live CD. When accessing the notepad++ folder on the SSD, Ubuntu stopped reading from the SSD too.

[barry2811]

Forgot to say as well, SMART reports no issues.

[barry2811]

Very peculiar. Result from SSLife shows excellent.

[Agent]

Keep an eye on it - Sandforce based drives vanishing from the BIOS is a classic indication of the Sandforce death problem. It might not amount to anything, but make sure you have frequent backups (you should have this anyway ).

SSLife as an app is quite basic. It looks at how much has been written and read and then tries to calculate it's rough lifetime. If the drive has a physical default, a firmware issue, or a chipset problem (hello SF-2281!) then SSDLife will still report everything being fine. It's somewhat useful to see the SMART values, but even then they are quite limited in predicting the death of a drive.

Heck, if you have a SSD that doesn't have a record of the amount of data written, SSDLife gets a bit upset and tries to work out its estimated death based on its power on time. Not particularly useful!

If you suspect an issue, backup, backup backup!

[kalniel]

Yeah but F60 should be SF1200 which doesn't have the problem the later 2000 series chips had. Might need a firmware update.

[Agent]

The 'vanishing from BIOS' issue wasn't just confined to the 2281 (which had a lot more issues), that's just a general Sandforce issue. Although mostly fixed in the latter firmwares, granted.

Sadly there is no way of knowing if it's going to die as with most hardware. The only consolation if it does is to have a solid backup plan.

[d3m0n1q_733rz]

Run an advanced S.M.A.R.T. test to check the SSD. It should help to fix any problems. However, if the part of the drive is bad, it's not going to read or write to it and any data that existed on that particular area will be gone. One of the shortcomings of pure SSDs.
When you said that S.M.A.R.T. reports no issues, was that after you ran the test or just based on its automatic checks?

[barry2811]

Thanks for the replies. The drive is running the latest firmware.

The SMART reporting no issues is from the AHCI BIOS check, and also Crystal Disk Info. Any other SMART tests recommended?

The drive is purely a boot drive, so nothing irreplaceable is on it, and my data spinners are reguarly backed up (mostly to an old PC running NAS4Free, but ultra important stuff like photos and documents also to SkyDrive).

The drive has been up to now, and also seems to be running ok now, albeit without access to that folder. It is my most used program, and it worked fine yesterday morning. Part of me couldn't rule out an issue with Windows, but the same thing happens accessing the folder from a Ubuntu Live CD.

[kalniel]

Yeah I'd agree about not ruling out a possible corrupt file issue rather than underlying hardware. But still rather odd.

Can you delete the folder? Run a virus scan?

[barry2811]

Couldn't delete it from within Windows, so did so in Ubuntu LiveCD. It moved it to a trash folder off the root, but accessing that causes the same issue. AntiVirus is clean.

I've disconnected the data drives too, so I'm definitely pointing at SSD failure now I think.

[DanceswithUnix]

If it happens randomly it could the the SATA cable.
If it is always the same file, that does sound like some sort of corruption within the SSD

[barry2811]

It's always the same folder.

I'm going to replace the SSD, I'm thinking about the Samsung 840 Pro 128GB. Any better options out there?

Thanks for all replies in this thread.

[Agent]

Sammy 830 / 840 / pro are excellent drives. Always highly regarded in reliability, with great speeds to match.

[John013]

Keep an eye on it - Sandforce based drives vanishing from the BIOS is a classic indication of the Sandforce death problem. It might not amount to anything, but make sure you have frequent backups (you should have this anyway ).

SSLife as an app is quite basic. It looks at how much has been written and read and then tries to calculate it's rough lifetime. If the drive has a physical default, a firmware issue, or a chipset problem (hello SF-2281!) then SSDLife will still report everything being fine. It's somewhat useful to see the SMART values, but even then they are quite limited in predicting the death of a drive.

Heck, if you have a SSD that doesn't have a record of the amount of data written, SSDLife gets a bit upset and tries to work out its estimated death based on its power on time. Not particularly useful!

If you suspect an issue, backup, backup backup!

I think initial versions of SF based SSDs have had a struggle with this vanishing act. But the latest firmware fixes have completely fixed these basic concerns & are very solid in performance too.