what does SSD failure look like

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travm

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In the past spinning disks usually failed slowly, with noises and other things that made you know it was dying.

I just had an SSD quit booting.
I put in another SSD (ironically an RMA replacement for one that failed over a year ago) and reinstalled windows 10.
It still shows up in the bios, and windows can see it in disk management, with all the partitions, but I cant open it or read anything.
Its a 480GB Patriot Blast. They have a horrible reputation for failures. Ive had 2 of 3 owned fail. This one is still inside the warranty period.
Any other troubleshooting options? I'm also on the fence whether or not I want to RMA it or just drop it in the E-waste and buy a better SSD, save myself the $50 shipping.
 
I've never had a failure with an SSD, but I would guess that if you are lucky that the SSD becomes read-only and you can copy your data. From your description it does not seem like you are lucky.
 
There was the longevity test by TechReport, where they intentionally tried to drive SSDs into exhaustion (which is just one way they can fail).

Only a few were able to hang in there and go read only after exhaustion... most just crapped out. Fortunately, most drives (seemingly all ~except~ Samsung) gave SMART errors well before that though.

There are a lot of different components in an SSD (or any drive) that could fail.

That being said, either you are extraordinarily unlucky with drives (which I wouldn't necessarily discount out of hand), or something funny going on with your SATA controller. Or it's possibly just a bad cable you keep reusing.

I had plenty of mechanical drives that just kaput without making the dishwasher noise of doom, endless clicking, or slow to an ungodly crawl but still have some semblance of accessibility.
 
I've owned SSD drives as my boot drive exclusively since 2009. Lot of the earlier SSD's gave out just due to technology, early manufacturing process of the chips used.

I've had a handful of SSD's just die on me.

However, anything I've owned over the past 3 years that I still have which isn't much never gave me any issue.

My GF's sister bought a PNY 240gb SSD 2 years ago and it just failed. The system acted really weird. It was try and load then just get stuck at a black screen.
 
Honestly it would be worth checking the SATA cable. Issues with them can make it look like you have failing harddrives or other quirky issues.

If you can get it to successfully read, you can install a S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics tool for a readout.
 
Last edited:
deaedius said:
Honestly it would be worth checking the SATA cable. Issues with them can make it look like you have failing harddrives or other quirky issues.

If you can get it to successfully read, you can install a S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics tool for a readout.
Click to expand...
I should have mentioned i tried this. swapped power and sata cables, and ports, etc.
I also installed the patriot toolbox software, everything looks peachy, just cant read any data off the damn thing. Says access denied.

There is very little useful data on it anyway, but it seems bricked. I sent the one i'm using back to patriot over a year ago, and in the meantime bought a samsung evo which i put in, and it didnt work either, swapped cables and off to the races. The one i sent to patriot came back (might have been a new one, dont recall), and i put it on the shelf. I'm using it today, and it seems to work. Its brother, i dont get it, everything in the bios looks good, in the patriot software its all good, i can scan the disk with the windows scan tool (whatever is built into computer managment) scandisk? It had errors, then said it fixed them, and subsequent scans dont find errors, but it still cant be read.
 
Do you have a sata adapter to plug the drive into a USB port to test it that way? Probably won't change anything but you seem to have tried everything else.
 
I had an ssd fail recently. It was a boot drive and it stopped showing up in BIOS. Put it in an external enclosure and plugged it into a usb port and it showed up in windows explorer. Tried to boot from it by putting it back in my rig, and nothing. Back in the usb enclosure, nothing. Toast. Non critical data fortunately.
 
My dead Crucial M4 started out by behaving oddly pre bootup. It would fail to boot on cold boots and would need a restart to get things running. When it got running though, there were no other symptoms, which initially led me to rule out the SSD until the whole drive died and I couldn't boot.
 
I too had a Patriot Blast fail on me, it is a 240GB. I called Patriot and asked them if they would replace it because its still under their warranty. They told me that the controller might have gone out & they would replace it.

I asked them if they could send me a new one but they wanted me to send it in for repair. I wasn't comfortable with that seeing how it still has an OS on it and sensitive information.
 
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