What the hell is happening with my SSD?

Harvestman · July 2, 2022

Earlier today, I swapped out my PSU. All seemed fine for a few hours, until I realized one of my 480gig WD SSDs was behaving very strangely.

On starting up windows, everything appears to be fine.

The drive is detected, initialized, and appears to be functioning as intended. The issues arises when attempting to access any of the data.

File explorer shows more or less the same, and all of my files are there. When I try and open something, I get an error that states "A device that does not exist was specified."

Running chkdsk shows that the format is raw, not NTFS, and if I run a rescan in disk management, it also shows that the file system is also raw/unrecognized. Running either of those tools also has a chance to make windows stop recognizing the drive altogether until I restart my machine.

As I was writing this post, the issue seems to have gone away, complicating things even further, as it more or less rules out my corruption theory. All of the data is intact. I know the SATA power is fine, as I have my boot drive on the same cable. It could be the connector on the end, but I don't think so, as my bios never seems to have any issue with the drive. I haven't been able to source a known good data cable, but I'm currently trying to. I don't think this is the issue either, as when I tried the cable on another drive it worked flawlessly. The data and power contacts on the drive look perfect. Any input/theories are greatly appreciated as I'm kind of at a loss here. Obviously I did something to it, but I have no idea what that would be. There isn't anything critical on there that isn't backed up, just some a couple of games and tools, so I don't need any help recovering anything.

If anything new arises or some revelation is made, I'll update the thread.

OddOod · July 3, 2022

What does Crystal Disk say about the SMART data?

Harvestman · July 3, 2022

37 minutes ago, OddOod said:

What does Crystal Disk say about the SMART data?

Looks alright to me, however I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to storage.

Harvestman · July 3, 2022

I've completely lost the ability to replicate the issue. If it stays that way for long enough, I'll mark this as resolved. No clue what's going on with this thing.