SSD Dead

[PeerRad]

Advice needed please, on a job I did.

HP Laptop i3 model 15-ac101ni.

Previous 500GB mechanical hard drive had faults and I replaced it with 120GB SSD.

At that point, laptop occasionally shutdown on battery when below 20% level. I adjusted the power management setting to cater for this by initiating shutdown and warnings at 20 & 25%.

Generic charger was being used and I noticed that it would charge to full in less than 1 hour. Advised to get correct charger - Voltage was correct but it was a 65W although the laptop spec is for 45W - I understand that provided the Voltage is correct, then laptop won't draw more Amps then necessary.

He bought another HP charger - also 65W but voltage of 19.6V is correct.

Laptop returned to me after he'd been using it and it died on him and wouldn't start properly- he took it in to one of the retail stores and after 4 days they said the SSD is faulty.

I've tested machine with a boot up flash drive memory tester, Linux Ubuntu Live DVD, and the built in memory tester.

Results: Laptop generally shuts down when on battery - even at 80% level - whether running memory tests, Linux diagnostics or YouTube videos - when on Ac charger is connected, laptop stays on and tests complete.

All memory & CPU tests passed - one of the UBUNTU tests failed - power managemt.

Running on Linux DVD, the Time to Full Charge indicator shifts continually - ranging from over 7 hours down to 1 hour - this is at 73% battery level.

My diagnosis is as follows:

The battery is faulty - possible damage caused by the previous generic charger.

SSD is dead as a result of repeated power outages without shutting down.

Comments would be appreciated

 

[sajunky]

Charging current is controlled by the laptop, getting higher power PSU doesn't hurt.

As for the battery, I don't understand these details, so I ask one question. How long takes to charge a battery after laptop shuts down under a light load?

There are utilities, also from HP that display the battery smart data and the voltage of each cell. Check it out.

 

[PeerRad]

Charging current is controlled by the laptop, getting higher power PSU doesn't hurt.

As for the battery, I don't understand these details, so I ask one question. How long takes to charge a battery after laptop shuts down under a light load?

There are utilities, also from HP that display the battery smart data and the voltage of each cell. Check it out.

Thanks sajunky.

At this point there is no hard drive working. I’m booting up from an UBUNTU DVD and running Linux from the DVD.

The details I gave about battery were that the indicator for amount of time to fully charge varied continually from between 7 hours to full capacity to under 1 hour to full capacity- at that point the indicator showed the battery as being at 73% of full capacity and moving up to 80% capacity while charging and the ‘Time to charge’ indicator figures were still fluctuating between 7 and 1 hours.

Laptop has just shut down again while booting up from DVD using battery. I need to run the battery down to answer your question, but as it keeps shutting down when not powered, this will take some time.

 

[PeerRad]

Update. Laptop shuts down repeatedly on battery. Running Linux from DVD, it charged from 80- 90 % in 2 hours. Now remaining at 90%while plugged in.

 

[sajunky]

A time to charge prediction can be completely misleading. On the other side cutting of the power when indicator shows 20% can happen once on the new or replacement battery, but after a full recharge cycle (initial charge to 70%, then full discharge till power is cut off and full charge with extra couple hours on the charger after charging indicator goes off) it shouldn't happen again. If it does, it indicate faulty battery. You can verify the battery ccondition only after installing OS and utilities. Linux Live CD may contain such utilities but I don't know any names to point you in the right direction

Q. After reading update, what is now remaining capacity when power is cut off?

 

[PeerRad]

Battery is faulty. Has cut out approximately 10 times - and switches on again after that to run for a while. When connected to power laptop remains on. Power is around 80% after 3 hours and doesn’t charge beyond that. When I disconnect charger after the 3 hours, the laptop cuts out within 10minutes. The 20% was 2 months back - battery has deteriorated.

I believe that this continued cutting out has destroyed the SSD.

 

[Rickster]

Try this in ubuntu:

 

[PeerRad]

Thanks Rickster - very useful. Gave the man his laptop back & told him to get another battery.
I assume the difference between "Energy when full" and "Energy (design)" represents amount of battery deterioration?

 

[PeerRad]

I tested it on my Dell and depite the battery being nearly done i.e. not too much life left, the time to charge remains consistent in an almost linear curve whereas the other laptop fluctuates consistently.

 

[Rickster]

Thanks Rickster - very useful. Gave the man his laptop back & told him to get another battery.
I assume the difference between "Energy when full" and "Energy (design)" represents amount of battery deterioration?

Yea, but look at capacity.

Similar to this tool for Mac.

 

[Rickster]

Not sure why windows doesn't have this type of battery monitoring.

 

[P924]

Not sure why windows doesn't have this type of battery monitoring.

Because it needs to support a lot of different hardware configurations, where OSX has to support only Apple hardware. Linux has similar stats, but accuracy and reliability is hardware dependent.

 

[Johnatan56]

Not sure why windows doesn't have this type of battery monitoring.

Because a majority of users don't use it?
If you actually need the stats, open cmcd or powershell as admin and run powercfg /batteryreport
which creates an html file with the details, a lot more than the following:

Pretty good considering the battery is over 3 years old, conservation mode is pretty useful.