Need help PC crashes and SSD disappears on and off.

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SomeGuy133

2[H]4U
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So this has been happening for the last 2 months and when my PC crashes my boot drive either vanishes or looses its place in boot priority. When it disappears I have to shut down via holding power key for it to reappear. If i just hit restart it won't show up again.

Is my Sandisk Extreme Pro dying? Or is this another issue?

This happened when downloading Natural Selection 2 combat. I got 800MB in the process and it stopped downloading and PC hanged and went BSOD.

Sandisk dashboard says I still have 97% life remaining with 33TB of writes so far on it.

I ran extended SMARt last night and it was normal. I am running extended SMART again and will report results in 10 mins
 
SomeGuy133 said:
i doubt power but could be SATA cable. I'll change it. Power cable brand new and other drives have no issue.
Click to expand...

Yep, def try the SATA cable. By power cable I meant the one that plugs directly into the drive.

One of my power supplies has a single bad SATA power connector on one of the cables. It drove me nuts until I finally figured out what was going on.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
i doubt power but could be SATA cable. I'll change it. Power cable brand new and other drives have no issue.
Click to expand...

Ok your options are as follows:

Bad drive
Bad cables
Bad motherboard

Doesn't matter if other drives are problem free, it could be the specific connector going to the bad drive.
 
ocellaris said:
Ok your options are as follows:

Bad drive
Bad cables
Bad motherboard

Doesn't matter if other drives are problem free, it could be the specific connector going to the bad drive.
Click to expand...

the power cable is a modular one from my supernova and it powers 3 drives. It is unlikely the power cable.

The MB is unlikely as well but possible i guess. The SATA cvable is a good bet and i'll give it a shot. The drive dying is also possible and i hope not.

When i crack this open again i'll swap cables. Thanks for the advice
 
I still think the SATA power connector being faulty is a good possibility.

Before I figured it out on my system, the same exact thing you are describing was happening with my system.

It wasn't the boot drive, but I did have some games installed on it. The system would either BSOD or the game would crash and the drive would not be there.

It got to a point where the drive would not even show up at all sometimes. I tried swapping SATA cables.. didn't help. I tried changing the SATA port that the drive was connected to - didn't help. I then tried a different power connector on the same SATA power cable and it took care of the problem. Tried hooking it back up to the original power connector and it started having problems again.
 
FYI this also happened on the old power supply so if its a power issue its the SSD power connector itseld.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
i doubt power but could be SATA cable. I'll change it. Power cable brand new and other drives have no issue.
Click to expand...

Not so quick. SATA power connectors are crap for everything but backplanes.
I guess the power is to blame as least as often as the SATA cable.
 
omniscence said:
Not so quick. SATA power connectors are crap for everything but backplanes.
I guess the power is to blame as least as often as the SATA cable.
Click to expand...

as i said it is a new cable and this issue happened on the previous cable from the old power supply. So either magically i had two bad SATA power cables or its the actual SSD power socket or whatever its called.

Or possibly a better option its the SATA cable.

Only two viable options is SATA cable or the power socket on the actual SSD is screwed. I honestly could see either being an option. Power cable is so unlikely due to reasons stated about. I wouldn't be surprised with all the times i have removed the SSD that the power socket is fucked up because these power cables are tough as hell to remove.
 
Get a SMART checking program, if the #199 value is large then it's either the power or SATA cable. In my experience SATA cables are all crap. They just randomly go bad for no apparent reason. In 2 years I have had to change 3 SATA cables out of my system. I use HDD sentinel to monitor my HD health and as soon as I see my log for a drive has a bunch of errors "#199 Ultra ATA CRC Error Count" It means the SATA cable is probably hosed and needs to be replaced.
 
LurkerLito said:
Get a SMART checking program, if the #199 value is large then it's either the power or SATA cable. In my experience SATA cables are all crap. They just randomly go bad for no apparent reason. In 2 years I have had to change 3 SATA cables out of my system. I use HDD sentinel to monitor my HD health and as soon as I see my log for a drive has a bunch of errors "#199 Ultra ATA CRC Error Count" It means the SATA cable is probably hosed and needs to be replaced.
Click to expand...

according to HDD Sentinel everything is passing and alwyas has since i installed it on their default settings. I haven't played with the program yet so would the issue pop up on stock settings?

What is "percentage total P/E Count XX,YY" Just curious.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
according to HDD Sentinel everything is passing and alwyas has since i installed it on their default settings. I haven't played with the program yet so would the issue pop up on stock settings?

What is "percentage total P/E Count XX,YY" Just curious.
Click to expand...
The thing with this particular error is the drive does pass if the cable isn't completely broken. What it usually looks like is the drive gets disconnected or takes a long time to read or write on occasion (well the last cable that went bad did that for me). Unfortunately till it actually happens there won't be anything in the log. For the other message you might want to go to the HDDSentinel forum and ask or email support. They author is very good with responding to questions.

My one bad experience with an SSD was my Mushkin Chronos 250GB. I had a similar issue where it would disappear for no reason then required me to actually power off before it would return. No reboot would fix it. I highly recommend you make daily backups ASAP. This particular problem I had was not a SATA cable, it was a dying SSD. A few weeks of this then one day it happened and I powered off and on and the drive never came back.

A SATA cable problem at least in my experience never required me to power off then on again to get the drive back.
 
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