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I have a Crucial M4 SSD that is 2.5 years old and still in warranty. The drive has a nasty habit: If it loses power, it disappears from my laptop. Crucial has a procedure for bringing it back to life prominently displayed on its support site:
1. Remove the drive from my laptop
2. Connecting it to the power of my desktop for 20 minutes.
3. Remove power and wait 30 seconds.
4. Repeat step 2.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD-Knowledge/Why-did-my-SSD-quot-disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215
The procedure works. Unfortunately, the result is often a corrupted windows installation. Crucial has issued bios fixes attempting to mitigate the issue, but if anything it appears to be getting worse: it has happened 3 times in the past 4 months or so and even at that, the drive has only been in my system for half the time!
If you google "ssd disappear", the majority of the hits you get are about this issue on the M4.
Crucial won't replace it because they say it is normal(!?):
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/48038-ssd-loses-connection-randomly-what-do.html
This involved a "Sandforce" controller and the forums suggest it was a bios bug that was fixed, but nevertheless took down the company:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce
But the M4 doesn't use the SandForce controller.
Worse, this paper implies that Crucial may be correct:
I quote/link the article about the white paper instead of the paper itself because it is a bit over my head. I really don't know what to do here. I have a $400 SSD that I'd rather not have to throw in the trash, but I also would rather not waste a day re-installing windows every time a minor issue causes it to disappear and become corrupted.
Anyone have experience with this issue? Comments? Recommendations?
1. Remove the drive from my laptop
2. Connecting it to the power of my desktop for 20 minutes.
3. Remove power and wait 30 seconds.
4. Repeat step 2.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD-Knowledge/Why-did-my-SSD-quot-disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215
The procedure works. Unfortunately, the result is often a corrupted windows installation. Crucial has issued bios fixes attempting to mitigate the issue, but if anything it appears to be getting worse: it has happened 3 times in the past 4 months or so and even at that, the drive has only been in my system for half the time!
If you google "ssd disappear", the majority of the hits you get are about this issue on the M4.
Crucial won't replace it because they say it is normal(!?):
Digging further, though, they may not be wrong, but that is not an easy question to answer: Googling "kingston ssd disappear", aside from links where people say they are going to replace their disappeared Crucial M4 with a new Kingston, there are some that describe the same issue happening with Kingston:Justin _M : It is normal for an SSD to need to power cycle after a sudden power failure, but if its locking up just after normal use that would be a cause of concern.
Russell Watters: I disagree. No computer is perfectly stable and most occasionally lock-up/crash. I've never owned another hard drive that required such a procedure to bring it back to life.
Russell Watters: I'm lucky enough to be computer savvy enough to know how to replace a hard drive (which I suppose is normal for a replacement HD buyer), otherwise I'd be screwed!
Justin _M : Its just due to the nature of the caching technology that this can happen when the computer crashes. You shouldn't be needed to reinstall windows each time this happens, but the power cycle will restart the garbage controller back in the SSD so it can get back to work on actively maintaining itself.
Russell Watters: I still disagree and point out that Crucial wouldn't be trying to address the issue with firmware fixes if it was actually normal. I'll certainly check to see if this is common to other vendors' drives (note, I already own another drive from another manufacturer and have yet to have this happen). Crucial needs to fix its caching technology.
Russell Watters: In any case, I'm not really here to argue: are you telling me Crucial will not under any circumstances replace a drive that is displaying the "disappear" problem?
Justin _M : That's not entirely true, but if the troubleshooting fixes it, I wouldn't want to send out a new drive to you to make you think it will be different, when this is the nature of the SSD as a whole.
[emphasis added]
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/48038-ssd-loses-connection-randomly-what-do.html
This involved a "Sandforce" controller and the forums suggest it was a bios bug that was fixed, but nevertheless took down the company:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SandForce
But the M4 doesn't use the SandForce controller.
Worse, this paper implies that Crucial may be correct:
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...ing-drive-are-power-outages-killing-your-ssds...but a report from the 11th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 13), given early this year, suggests most models have a fundamental problem with sudden power loss. While the paper came out in mid-February, I only recently came across it, after a reader asked if I’d look into a rather puzzling recovery program recommended by Crucial for its M4 SSD line...
Baffled, I began to poke at this further, then stumbled across the aforementioned report from early this year.
Samsung Flash SSDResearchers working with the University of Ohio rounded up 15 different SSDs from five different vendors, as well as a brace of HDDs, and put them through a series of tests designed to measure how they responded to sudden power failures. No vendors are identified, but the drives in question incorporate both MLC and SLC. Some (the SLC versions) are explicitly enterprise drives. Some include supercapacitors, which are designed to mitigate catastrophic power failure.
Of the 15 drives (10 different models, from five vendors), only one drive model, from one vendor, had no failures of any sort. One device failed completely (SSD #1), while one-third of SSD #3 became unusable due to metadata corruption. The other SSDs all exhibited various types of data corruption when they unexpectedly lost power, including the high-end enterprise SSDs with SLC NAND and supercapacitors. According to the research team, part of the problem is that virtually none of the devices actually behave as expected under fault conditions. While all the drives claim to use ECC RAM, for example, many exhibited single-bit errors of the kind of errors that ECC is meant to prevent. While one of the two included hard drives also developed errors, the HDDs are both far cheaper and showed no sign of the disastrous failures that characterized the SSDs.
[emphasis added]
I quote/link the article about the white paper instead of the paper itself because it is a bit over my head. I really don't know what to do here. I have a $400 SSD that I'd rather not have to throw in the trash, but I also would rather not waste a day re-installing windows every time a minor issue causes it to disappear and become corrupted.
Anyone have experience with this issue? Comments? Recommendations?
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