Help, My SSD just died

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Veyron786

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I've been enjoying all the wonders of a modern SSD drive since February this year, but this morning after a perfectly normal shutdown last night, it just refused to boot up or even be detected within the BIOS. I've tried installing it into my external 2.5" USB case to test but still no luck.

Can the SSD simply just be dead for no apparent reason?

Has anyone else had failed SSD drives?

The drive is a G.Skill Falcon II 64GB.
 
are ssd's hot swappable?

i've plugged a normal sata hdd in after bootup, and managed to get windows to pick it up, and fix it that way using tools (it had power since bootup though, DONT plug it's power in after your pc is on)
 
Nand memory does have a limited number if writes, but as far as I know it should still be readable. That means your booting issues could possibly a buggered controller.
you can read up more on SSDS here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738

and here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829

you may also want to ask on the Anandtech forums they seem prett clued up on the whole SSD thing and may be able to help you more.
 
Can you get other drives to detect in the BIOS i.e. normal HDD?

Try flashing your BIOS, or just swapping to the other BIOS (if you have dual-BIOS). I've had cases of disappearing drives in the BIOS that a BIOS flash has solved. Worth a try.
 
SSd's just like any other computer component can suffer failure.

Pop in another pc if you still get nothing, get it swapped out.
 
FlatspinZA said:
Can you get other drives to detect in the BIOS i.e. normal HDD?

Try flashing your BIOS, or just swapping to the other BIOS (if you have dual-BIOS). I've had cases of disappearing drives in the BIOS that a BIOS flash has solved. Worth a try.
Click to expand...

All the other devices still detect so its not the bios.

I've managed to get it to detect with the firmware upgrade jumper, I updated the drives firmware which it completed but there was quite a number of errors during the update.

It is working again but i don't know for how long.
 
Veyron786 said:
All the other devices still detect so its not the bios.

I've managed to get it to detect with the firmware upgrade jumper, I updated the drives firmware which it completed but there was quite a number of errors during the update.

It is working again but i don't know for how long.
Click to expand...

Which is all dandy, but sometimes you have an infection on a drive, which in turn leads to BIOS corruption/infection - so you flash the BIOS & format the drive that is giving your grief.
 
FlatspinZA said:
Which is all dandy, but sometimes you have an infection on a drive, which in turn leads to BIOS corruption/infection - so you flash the BIOS & format the drive that is giving your grief.
Click to expand...

+1

it may also be some dead nand now that I think about it. If it's still under warranty I'd make a disk mirror and then return it for a new one.
 
Veyron786 said:
I've been enjoying all the wonders of a modern SSD drive since February this year, but this morning after a perfectly normal shutdown last night, it just refused to boot up or even be detected within the BIOS. I've tried installing it into my external 2.5" USB case to test but still no luck.

Can the SSD simply just be dead for no apparent reason?

Has anyone else had failed SSD drives?

The drive is a G.Skill Falcon II 64GB.
Click to expand...

Mine died around 2 months ago too, and when i got my replacement, it also kicked the bucket.
I feel your pain.
 
SSD drive failures are often controller failures, it normally goes before a NAND chip goes. Expensive to recover if you can't find an identical replacement controller.
 
Just make sure that AHCI is still enabled in your BIOS after the power failure. My board did a reset once after an outage and I have exactly the same problem until I saw that my SATA controller had reverted to IDE instead of AHCI. I changed that and the drive suddenly reappeared and all was well with the world once again :)
 
South_Bit said:
SSD drive failures are often controller failures, it normally goes before a NAND chip goes. Expensive to recover if you can't find an identical replacement controller.
Click to expand...

Hence not a good thing to store data on. Keep your OS or Apps on it but store you data on normal HDD with backups.
 
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