SSD Dead?

[PI87]

Hi,

About a year ago, I purchased an Asus R510V laptop. Nothing special, just for usual work purposes. The only bad thing is that it has a quite slow HDD. So, a couple of months ago I decided to replace it with an SSD and to get a (Chinese) HDD caddy (http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hot-...y-9-5mm-2-5-SATA-3-0-SSD-Case/2053870336.html).

I replaced it with my 'old' desktop SSD which is a Corsair Force 3 120GB. It is now 4 years old.

In the first weeks after the replacement, I didn't had the caddy yet. But my laptop wasn't working that good. I did a fresh install of Windows 8.1, but after only one week it got completely corrupted, no idea why. Did another fresh install, seemed to work. Some days later, installed the caddy. I did had the feeling it sometimes freezed a little bit.

But now, last months it is driving me crazy. Now and then the laptop freezes (sometimes no problems in days, weeks...), the only way to fix it is to hard reboot. It got stuck at the reboot, again another hard reboot is required, and again, and once again... . After the third time, it shows me the restore menu, I just click reboot, and voila, it is fixed. I've the feeling it happens more when I use software that is installed on the SSD and demands little bit more from it. Like Visual Studio, Android Studio and so on.

Checked out the SMART status, both disks are OK. Did it with HD Sentinel. SSD condition is 74% (good), total time is 506 days and 4 hours, estimated is 722 days, total data is 13.36TB. My HDD only worked for about 77 hours.

Yesterday evening I tried to upgrade to Windows 10. It was updating very slowly, so I decided to give it a night. This morning, the update was stuck at 8% (28% of the files where copied). Did a hard reboot, same story, went auto back to Win 8.1... .

As a test I connected it to my desktop, booted into it (without any issues), tried to update to Windows 10 as well. Got a little bit further, rebooted a couple times, got stuck. Rebooting didn't solve it this time. Putted the SSD back into the laptop, some reboots and solved. Tried again an upgrade to Windows 10, worked perfectly and is still working. (Maybe it is solved, maybe it is due some driver issues?)

I removed the second HDD (and so the caddy), did a benchmark on the SSD with PCMark, completed perfecltly, nothing special. Got the caddy back connected, did the same benchmark, this time on the HDD. Again, nothing special.

Forgot to mention, I also gave memtest a run (4 hours) a couple of weeks ago, no issues there.

So, what now...? Is it the SSD, is it the caddy, a combination, or did I overlook something else?

 

[PI87]

By the way, only once (or maybe twice) I got a BSOD : KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

 

[silicon]

try a new SSD..sounds like the old one is failing. Should be no need to load and reload windows..very time consuming. Also try memtest to see that the memory is working correctly.

 

[PI87]

try a new SSD..sounds like the old one is failing. Should be no need to load and reload windows..very time consuming. Also try memtest to see that the memory is working correctly.

Do you think it is broken, because benchmarks and so on run normal?

 

[silicon]

Do you think it is broken, because benchmarks and so on run normal?

try memtest to check the ram of the computer.

 

[PI87]

try memtest to check the ram of the computer.

I already did, couple of weeks ago. But only for about 4 hours. No errors.

 

[Ketchup]

It does sound like a drive issue. The KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR means that the page file couldn't be read into memory, which implicated that:
a) it hit a bad area of memory that could not read it, or
b) the data was corrupted while sitting on the drive

S.M.A.R.T. is good and bad. It is great at giving you a glimpse of drive health, but it can't really detect a single point of failure on a drive or SSD.

Couple of things you can try:
a) Put the hard drive back into the laptop and see if it will accomplish the upgrade.
b) Do you have more than one stick of RAM? Try running one stick at a time and see if the problems go away /get worse.
c) Since it sounds like things are getting worse, run memtest again and see if the results are any different.

 

[PI87]

a) -> is already done, sorry if this was not clear, the update worked, the benchmakred are running fine
b & c) -> one stick (8GB), currently running memtest, nothing so far.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I replaced it with my 'old' desktop SSD which is a Corsair Force 3 120GB. It is now 4 years old.

Is this one of the 2nd-gen SandForce controller-based SSDs? If so, you may want to replace it. They were prone to problems.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I suppose that it's possible that the caddy is the problem introducing an intermittent connection. Why would you not just use the laptop sata connector and drive holder? Have you tried using the drive with the laptop outside of the caddy to rule it out?

 

[PI87]

Is this one of the 2nd-gen SandForce controller-based SSDs? If so, you may want to replace it. They were prone to problems.

I think so, it has a SF2281 controller, which is as far is know 2nd gen. But worked fine till now, but it is indeed getting old.

I suppose that it's possible that the caddy is the problem introducing an intermittent connection. Why would you not just use the laptop sata connector and drive holder? Have you tried using the drive with the laptop outside of the caddy to rule it out?

The reason why I use a caddy is quite simple, there is only one dedicated connection for a hard disk. As 120GB isn't that much I needed some more storage space, and since I had already the 1TB disk, this was a quite cheap option.

I didn't try it out without the caddy, as I don't have the right converts. But I think there is no physical problem to say so. As I replace the DVD-drive with the caddy which is the same size.

MemTest
So far so good, no errors (it is running now for more than 4 hours). Will give it a night.

 

[PI87]

MemTest is now running for more than 15 hours, 11 passes, no errors. I think I may conclude the RAM is ok.

 

[johny12]

No problems with my sandforce based SSDs. I have been using it for a while now and it works totally fine.

 

[johny12]

Is this one of the 2nd-gen SandForce controller-based SSDs? If so, you may want to replace it. They were prone to problems.

No problems with my sandforce based SSDs. I have been using it for a while now and it works totally fine.