Disk stops working until SATA cable replugging

Paijan · May 12, 2021

Hello

I have an Intel SSDSC2CW240A3 drive along with MSI Z390 Gaming Edge AC mobo. Recently I've been experiencing a quite bizarre problem.

Most of the times the SSD works perfectly normal, but Sometimes it enters some weird state in which many files/directories are inaccessible. Usually it's quite random, but I noticed it happens very often during program installation. I get an error saying "A device which does not exist was specified", when I try to do stuff in Windows Explorer. Some files are still functional and a couple of programs even work, which leads me to believe it might be somehow correlated with how the data is laid out inside the partition. I tried analyzing the drive with various health check tools - they either crash, report 100% corruption or ignore the SSD, while it's in the broken state. Other times it looks perfectly normal.

When I try to reboot the PC, it hangs on motherboard loading screen. Funny thing is that turning off the PC, unplugging the SATA data cable and plugging it back again resolves the issue. This is the only way I have to get it back working. This is really frustrating, I'm thinking of buying a new drive, but maybe there is something I can do. I already tried a BIOS update, which didn't help.

Thank you for the responses.