Troubleshooting SSD issues

trekkie1701c · February 18, 2018

So I have a new-ishly built computer (not all the parts are new, but it's only a few weeks old). A few days ago, it rebooted and the BIOS wasn't able to detect the SSD. Easy, so SSD dead, right? Except I turned it off, turned it back on, and it booted in to Windows just fine.

Since then it's been running fine. I already have the data backed up and all that so don't advise me to get everything off of it that I want to keep; most of the data anyways is duplicated to a laptop, a random 2TB hard drive I have and my NAS with the really important stuff backed up to a few places in that cloud-thingy people talk about.

My working theory is that I may have overheated the SSD; it's located below a GTX 1080 that wouldve been under 100% load and had been for about 23-ish hours at that point doing BOINC workloads, right next to another 1080 doing the same. Both tend to cap out at about mid to upper 70s with the fans running at full (hotter if I don't do that), but I'm not really sure how to properly test that theory. As I understand it, SSDs get finicky if you run them too hot; at the time I was also copying a lot of data to/from the SSD (The most recent backup, actually)

I don't have any sort of bluescreen error message and there was no crash dump; I was at work at the time of the reboot and came back ~6 hours afterwards to the computer complaining about not having a boot drive.

The last event in the event viewer is ESEDiskFlushConsistency, which was at the approximate time of the crash (Listed at 3:09 PM; the computer was connected to a server I own which showed a 180 second ping timeout at 3:12pm), though I'm not sure if this is related.

Specs:

Intel Core i7 6700k @ 4.20ghz

2x GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition

4x8gb GSkill Ripjaws V DDR4 2133

Gigabyte Z170X Gaming G1 w/latest BIOS

480gb Kingston HyperX Predator

Edited February 18, 2018 by trekkie1701c

BecauseRussia · February 18, 2018

Everything you have said makes sense, so if you think the SSD overheated, why not move it to another place in the PC? (If possible) You could also check to make sure that none of the SATA cables are loose.

trekkie1701c · February 18, 2018

Both the M.2 slots are right next to the GPUs, and the GPU it's closest to is the cooler running of the pair; so outside of getting a M.2 -> SATA adapter I think moving it might make any thermal issues worse.