Dead SSD?

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jerryyyyy

Member
Jun 1, 2024
24
0
Hi,

Have a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO as the primary drive for the computer that runs my astronomical observatory... started getting funny errors and tried to do a file system check, whereupon the system became unbootable.

Having been here before I was so proud of myself to make a weekly disk copy to another 850 attached by a USB SATA connection.... Samsung Magician.... exact same type of drive.... well 1h later back up and running. I would pat myself on the back if my arms were long enough.

The bad drive cannot be seen by Spinrite or Windows. Windows gives the error D\ Is not accessible... the parameter is incorrect...

Is this drive for the wastebin? Too light for a doorstop :(

Have to say spinning media never went down this fast on me...
 
I have (almost) one of these in one of my FreeBSD laptops. An 870 EVO. I'm surprised it's toast as these SSDs are good for 600 cycles.

I suggest installing smartmontools and running smartctl -a <the drive>. Post the output here.

You can also run smartctl -x <the drive>. This will give you different but more detailed information. You can post that output here too.

An example output from my EVO is,

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 1
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 7361
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 548
177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 4
179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0x0013 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0013 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
187 Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032 066 042 000 Old_age Always - 34
195 ECC_Error_Rate 0x001a 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
199 CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
235 POR_Recovery_Count 0x0012 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 84
241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 11338984279
252 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 102

And of course if its self assessment is "PASSED."

I'd also suggest running smartctl -x on it. That'll run its self test. The self full read self test on my 870 takes 85 minutes when the SSD isn't actively being used by the O/S.

We can probably do a better assessment after looking at the smartcl -a output and if you can run the self test, post those results later.

Regarding NTFS errors. It's more likely that your Windows suffered some in-memory kernel corruption that resulted in gibberish being written to disk. Running smartctl might rule out the hardware and point squarely at the O/S. If the drive is unbootable, pop it into another machine as a second disk and run smartctl there. What we're trying to establish is whether the drive is at fault or the O/S.
 
Hi,

Thanks for the response. I looked at smartmontools in VirusTotal and there are a couple posts there that suggest it may be unsafe, so could use a little reassurance. Looks like a useful tool but some people have looked at it in depth. I am a lucky CrowdStrike user and it came up clean in their hands.

I had cloned the disk about two weeks ago using Samsung Magician and am complete back up an running with the clone, the original (bad) disk cannot be seen by another computer or Spinrite, so I think it is cooked. I think it lasted maybe 3-4 years. Hard to tell from my Amazon records. I am going to clone the 1TB to a 2TB model.

Appreciate the help,

Jerry Y
 
I’ve had SSDs go bad very quickly. If your system has two NVMe slots, install it as a secondary drive and run Samsung magician against it.
 
Great idea. Magician is NoGo also unfortunately.

Frankly I went out and bought an 870 (2TB) as this system in mission critical and I wanted to back it up. I initialized the disk and it is ready to clone the observatory system disk tomorrow. Same day delivery by Amazon. I do not want to recreate this system disk with 1000 settings.

While I was doing this I used my observatory analysis machine (a fast Ryzen with a big GPU for AI) and I realized that I had installed two 2TB 970 M.2 cards in it (and forgot about the second when I built the machine). I better use Magician to clone the C: drive of that machine too, which was my original idea. The magician scan of that C: drive says it is in Good condition. That system has twin 16TB HDD mirrored as the main data storage backed up to the cloud. Analyses are done on the SSD C: If the C: goes out on this one I can do the same switcheroo I did with the other.... fingers crossed in all directions.
 
Hey thanks. Got the main observatory disk cloned to the new SSD so I can sleep well. I did the M.2 while I was at it, so I am covered.... with the retrospectoscope I could see the SSDD failing over about 2 weeks but I thought I was screwing up on software settings... astronomy is really a house of cards for software...