Vanishing system SSD

Hi.

 

Last month (May 12th of 2015) I've purchased parts for a new PC, several of which were from Corsair, on my friends recommendation as a reliable, high-quality manufacturer.

 

One of those parts is a 120GB Force LS SSD drive. For the past month, it proved excellent. It's remarkably fast, and I had no trouble of any kind with it for the 30-some days I've owned it.

 

Up until yesterday evening.

 

While watching a youtube video, the screen suddenly froze. At first, I thought it's the browser acting up, but the pc didn't react to anything.

After a bluescreen and reset, a boot error message greeted me; The SSD, serving as my system drive, was nowhere to be found.

 

Several resets, and checking my bios settings yielded no results. The drive had vanished.

 

I turned the pc off, to check on the cables inside. As expected, they were perfectly fine, there being nothing to break them.

 

To my suprise, when I turned it on again some minutes later, my system drive reappeared as suddenly as it had vanished, and windows booted up with no problems, in it's usual speedy manner.

I stayed up gaming for about 6 more hours, during which no more problems presented themselves.

 

On the next day (today), in 4 hours of use it happened again, twice, during gaming.

Repeats exactly as it did the first time. Screen freezes, BSOD, no system drive recognized on reset, after a minute of power down the pc starts as if nothing happened.

 

I'm concerned.

An hour of search yielded a worryingly high number of similar incidents, all involving SSDs. Some from this very forum, several from other sites, with none of them offering any real conclusion or help.

 

The updating of bios, drivers, and firmware is a frequent advice, but just as shallow. One such post dates back to 2011. I believe if it was a software problem it would have been found and fixed by now.

Moreover, if it was a software problem, why did my SSD work perfectly for the first month of its life?

I know I have changed nothing, installed no new software that could have caused this.

 

What is happening?

Hey bro,

 

This happened to me 3 times in the last 2 years. Every time they exchanged the drive, no questions asked. However, they didn't compensate for countless hours of Windows reinstallation, recovering photos and saved games etc. for some reason. Not even going to bother exchanging this last one, will just throw it away and switch to something else.

Replace the Sata cable. I had this happen for a while with a crucial ssd and that was the fix. Worth a shot since they are inexpensive.

Well that's something I haven't tried. Got a few spare cables too.

But my HDD is connected to the same one, and that's not disappearing.

 

And it didn't happen again after I wrote my post. Who knows when it will.

 

Two of my friends say their SSDs "acted weird" until they changed from AHCI to IDE mode.

That'd involve re-installing windows, so I'll hold off on trying that until it becomes a regular nuisence.

 

I'm starting to think this might be some inherent flaw to all SSDs everywhere, and it might take some more years to perfect the technology.

Maybe I should have gone with a tried and trusted HDD.

No clue. SSD's have been pretty standard for a couple of years now. I've used a few brands without any real issue as well. (Crucial, Mushkin, Corsair). It's just possible you got a bunk one but I wouldn't get rid of them all together.