RIP 480GB SSD

[porina]

I have a Sandisk SSD Plus 480GB (2.5") bought just over a year ago. It was used for multiple things, eventually ending up in my laptop as a game install drive. A few days ago I noticed it missing after booting into windows, and after a reboot it reappeared so I thought nothing more of it. Then the laptop started to not boot at all. It would hang before loading OS. I could still get into bios, and noticed the SSD was no longer visible in the list of drives. I was travelling at the time and found with more rebooting the laptop would get to Windows, just without that drive.

 

Now I'm back home, I took the cover off (MSI laptop needs you to remove the whole bottom cover) and the connection looked nice and tight. It wasn't a loose connection. Just to be safe I unplugged and replugged it. No luck. Ok, let's try an external USB-SATA cable. Nope. At this point, it is looking likely it died. I'll give it one last try in another desktop to make sure, but I think I'm about to find out how good Sandisk's warranty process is.

 

I don't think I have any valuable data loss here, as it was mainly game installs, and backup copies of photos which I already have elsewhere and backed up.

[jcw150]

I had an issue with the same SSD and Sandisk were great, they sent me a new drive pretty quickly.

[ARikozuM]

Contact SanDisk. The customer service is pretty good from my usage. 

[Teddy07]

38 minutes ago, porina said:

 It would hang before loading OS. I could still get into bios, and noticed the SSD was no longer visible in the list of drives

 

1

I had the exact same thing happen to me with my new 2 weeks old SSD. I have sent it back under warranty.I wonder if it is related to laptops because you carry them around and so on.

[ARikozuM]

What laptops do you two use? @Teddy07 @porina

[porina]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

What laptops do you two use? @Teddy07 @porina

MSI GE62 6QF

[Teddy07]

16 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

What laptops do you two use? @Teddy07 @porina

5 year old HP Probook 4530s. Works totally fine with my old HDD. I upgraded the cpu and replaced the keyboard lately instead of buying a new one

[porina]

Ok, tried it in a Ryzen desktop. It was very slow to boot, and drive wasn't detected. Time to RMA.

[porina]

Just tried to look up if there were stats on "sudden death" rates for SSDs, as opposed to gradual wear.

 

So far I found http://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-reliability-in-the-real-world-googles-experience/ and via that, this paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast16/fast16-papers-schroeder.pdf

 

I haven't had a chance to go through it yet, but there are some interesting highlights in the 1st link. I'm not sure it mentions sudden failures.

 

[porina]

Some other reference links I need to look at later in more detail:

 

Assorted issues and notes: https://moonlightknighthk.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/ssd-is-unreliable/

Official Crucial method to try and revive disappeared SSD: http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Why-did-my-SSD-quot-disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215

Unofficial method: http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/How-I-fixed-my-M4-that-wouldn-t-detect-in-the-BIOS/td-p/110964

Power failures may contribute: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/169124-the-mysteriously-disappearing-drive-are-power-outages-killing-your-ssds

 

[porina]

I tried the power thing in earlier link which didn't help, not that I expected it to since that was for a Crucial, and mine is a Sandisk, but I had nothing to lose apart from a little time in trying.

 

Anyway, I just filled in the RMA request form and will see how this goes...

[porina]

I've just got the RMA approved (just under 24 hours from requesting) along with return details via pre-paid UPS. I note the approval states I will get a new product although not necessarily in retail packaging. I wouldn't have been surprised to get a refurb, but it isn't unknown that it might be more efficient to generally recycle than attempt to revive a product for reuse.

[porina]

To close this off, I just received the replacement drive. It is new in normal retail packaging. So that's 16 days from requesting RMA to receiving the replacement.