Just great. SSD just died.

[Waco]

My second drive (a Corsair X128) just took a dump. Its not detected at boot after a random storage-related BSOD while surfing OCC.

 

 

Sometimes I really hate computers. This is my second SSD that died randomly and I don't put mine through all that much abuse. :/ This time it's out of warranty as well and my system images will only work for a 256 GB or larger boot drive (I don't have any spare large HDDs or SSDs).

 

 

 

Dammit.

[El_Capitan]

That sucks. What was your first SSD?

 

If it's out of warranty, you can try opening that baby up and taking a look and see if there's any abnormalities.

[Waco]

The other drive is a G.Skill Falcon 128 GB. I had the equivalent BIOS on them both (since internally they are literally the same hardware, right down to the flash chips) and they were running in RAID 0 off of the Intel controller on my board.

 

At least when my first drive died (the Falcon, which I got RMA'd) it gave warning signs through corrupt files and general wonkiness. This Corsair drive literally just stopped working out of the blue.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Waco

[bp9801]

You really don't have much luck with SSDs.

 

Any chance getting in touch with Corsair and explaining the situation?

[El_Capitan]

Do you think it was the RAID 0 that did them in?

[iskout]

Aren't SSD's supposed to be MORE reliable than mechanical drives? Go figure.

 

I'm looking at having to get a new drive, soon, too. My 250GB boot drive is acting a little odd (CDM tests anywhere between 30 MB/S read/write and 90 MB/S read/write, with my disk at idle for all tests), but I'm hoping it'll hold out for a few more months.

[Waco]

Do you think it was the RAID 0 that did them in?

I cannot come up with a reason why it would contribute to their failure (I never did any heavy benchmarking and the firmware was up to date on both of them - so they both had garbage collection as well). My first failure (the G.Skill drive) was when I was just running it in AHCI mode.

 

 

Aren't SSD's supposed to be MORE reliable than mechanical drives? Go figure.

Well so far I'm at a 100% failure rate within 1 year for both of the SSDs I've had. If the trend continues my RMA return will die within a few months. Then I'll be 3 for 3.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Waco

[El_Capitan]

I've used over 30 SSD's, and at least 12 different varieties, and none so far have failed. However, I don't run any in RAID. Either just really bad luck, or RAID caused the issues?

[PremiumAcc]

I cannot come up with a reason why it would contribute to their failure (I never did any heavy benchmarking and the firmware was up to date on both of them - so they both had garbage collection as well). My first failure (the G.Skill drive) was when I was just running it in AHCI mode.

 

 

 

Well so far I'm at a 100% failure rate within 1 year for both of the SSDs I've had. If the trend continues my RMA return will die within a few months. Then I'll be 3 for 3.

 

That sucks. Your SSDs only have a warranty of 1 year?

I am telling you Waco, the RAID aka lack of TRIM is wearing your SSDs out. "Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur." That was explicitly stated by the President of the Windows division of Microsoft.

Edited January 12, 2012 by PremiumAcc

[Waco]

I've used over 30 SSD's, and at least 12 different varieties, and none so far have failed. However, I don't run any in RAID. Either just really bad luck, or RAID caused the issues?

I'm going to go with really bad luck and first-generation drives. Were any of the ones you used the original Indilinx Barefoot drives? Mine are both the older 3x nm flash which is supposed to be pretty durable. Last I checked I had only burned through, on average, 1000 write cycles throughout the drive. A huge chunk of the spare area was still available as well.

 

I especially don't think it's the RAID since my first drive died having never been in a RAID array.

 

 

I am telling you Waco, the RAID aka lack of TRIM is wearing your SSDs out.

I am telling you PermiumAcc, that the first drive died when it wasn't in RAID.

 

The SMART values for the drive in question were all well in the green when I checked them last week. The firmware I'm using also supports garbage collection which helps negate the performance loss from the lack of TRIM. No SSD is going to die in a year simply because it doesn't have TRIM...especially not first generation Indinlinx drives.

 

 

Further background - I had the write cache enabled on the RAID controller to merge write operations. My temporary files, pagefile, and logs were all written to a secondary array of HDDs.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Waco

[El_Capitan]

I'm going to go with really bad luck and first-generation drives. Were any of the ones you used the original Indilinx Barefoot drives? Mine are both the older 3x nm flash which is supposed to be pretty durable. Last I checked I had only burned through, on average, 1000 write cycles throughout the drive. A huge chunk of the spare area was still available as well.

 

I especially don't think it's the RAID since my first drive died having never been in a RAID array.

Yeah, it's probably because them being first-gen. The oldest SSD I ever got was probably the Corsair P128, and they're still pretty solid.

[Waco]

"Indilinx Barefoot drives - great until they go belly up."

 

I'm going to contact Corsair anyway to see if they can do anything but I highly doubt it since I bought it used off of Amazon (I confirmed that it was not abused before using it for anything and it had never been flashed as far as I could tell).