SSD Failed - SMART settings in BIOS revived

[Elohim]

Hey All,

I was working on some excel documents while my God daughter watched some Netflix on a 2nd monitor beside me. I was saving a document and my computer froze up completely, though Netflix played out it's buffered content before quitting. Upon reboot, my SSD, a 256GB C300, was not detected. I tried two more reboots and still nothing. My other 4 mechanical hard drives all detected fine, just the SSD failed. I was quite disturbed at this point. Just as a random attempt I went into the BIOS and tweaked the only hard drive I could think of tweaking. Which was the SMART hard drive capability, which had been turned off. Upon reboot, my SSD was detected and I was able to boot windows.

Just wanted to see if anyone else has had this happen or heard of such a thing. Should I be concerned for the health of my SSD or most likely a random occurrence?

Thanks!

Mark

[computron9000]

I'd certainly do some SMART checks on it to see if there are any errors. You could also check the Event Viewer for i/o related issues. I don't have much direct experience with SSDs, but anytime a drive behaves out of the ordinary I'd immediately back everything up and assume it is unreliable until proven otherwise.

[UberGerbil]

Do you have the latest firmware installed on the C300?

[Elohim]

Well, it happened again this past Friday. Same sort of deal, only changing any BIOS setting did nothing, so I think was just a random event before. I opened my case verified the cables all looked secure. After a few more boots, it once again randomly came back to life. I did immediately upgrade the firmware from version 6 to version 7. So I have been "up" for two days now, hopefully for good.

[ShadowEyez]

SSD's unfortunatley do this type of thing. It can depend on the type of chip the SSD has, sometimes sandforce can refuse to boot or come up with errors.

I have an OCZ agility 3 that in a raid0 array on my main machine that was acting erratic - everytime I would boot, the raid array would say the "member disk" had an error, but would continue to boot in to windows, though the system would sometimes freeze after a few hours and sometimes when on a cold boot, would need to be restarted right after booting into windows. Updated firmware, secure erased drives, reset raid array and re-installed windows - hopefully doesn't happen to me again...

I guess they are still working out the "bugs" in SSD

[computron9000]

SSD's unfortunatley do this type of thing. It can depend on the type of chip the SSD has, sometimes sandforce can refuse to boot or come up with errors.

I have an OCZ agility 3 that in a raid0 array on my main machine that was acting erratic - everytime I would boot, the raid array would say the "member disk" had an error, but would continue to boot in to windows, though the system would sometimes freeze after a few hours and sometimes when on a cold boot, would need to be restarted right after booting into windows. Updated firmware, secure erased drives, reset raid array and re-installed windows - hopefully doesn't happen to me again...

I guess they are still working out the "bugs" in SSD

Any articles in particular you might be able to link about this stuff? Or some sort of relevant commentary to this issue? I mean this sort of weirdness can happen to people too with mechanical drives, with weirdness between i/o controllers / motherboard vendors, whatever. Is it systemic to SSDs or just more prevalent with them as they are immature compared to mechanical drives?

[ShadowEyez]

Today is the day I mailed off my RMA OCZ drive - hopefully they get back a new one soon.

The kind of info you're seeking about SSD drives is best from two types of sites; hardware sites like TR, storage reviews, etc... give an overview of each generation/capacity of drive, and give good relative performance of each drive to the others.

For specific issues about your drive, the best spot is the manufacturer support forms, which OCZ and crucial are known for. If you have already purchased a drive and are having specific issues, you can usually find others with the issue and a solution on those fourms, or at least talk to the support gurus.

The TR storage forms also work