Brand New Neutron 240GB SSD Failed after 5 days?

[chris.suttles]

Ordered some parts this past weekend, including my first SSD ever, a Corsair Neutron 240GB SSD. Needless to say, everything went great and was working great until this morning. Went to boot my desktop, and got an invalid boot device message. Go into the bios, and notice my SSD is not even being detected by my bios. I did a lot of troubleshooting - tried different SATA ports (both SATA II and III), different cables, and different rails for power and still nothing.

 

I was able to do a replacement online and should have the new SSD tommorow.:biggrin:

 

HOWEVER -- I starting to think it may actually be MY OWN fault the drive failed. I use Bitlocker drive encryption with all my drives for security, and according to Microsoft, it is safe to use with SSDs - even with trim. I only noticed a very small performance drop with it enabled - I only saw about a 6% performance drop in benchmarks. That is until the drive stopped working all together.

 

Is encryption actually supported on SSDs?

 

Quoted from Microsoft:

 

"When Bitlocker is first configured on a partition, the entire partition is read, encrypted and written back out. As this is done, the NTFS file system will issue Trim commands to help the SSD optimize its behavior."

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

 

--Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft

 

Here is the link reguarding Microsofts claim that bitlocker full encyrption is safe on SSDs since Windows 7:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprosecurity/thread/02bf1f74-092c-42f2-9888-c8ef43ab1c19/

 

Just want to get a word of mouth on weither I caused the problem, or if it is just a highly rare drive failure.

[Incriminated]

I starting to think it may actually be MY OWN fault the drive failed.

 

Not to sound advising, but i would generally recommend you to always start to think it may actually be your own fault first. That always means when something is not like it is supposed to be your first thinking should be "what could i have done wrong" and shoot out any doubts regarding your own systems specific hardware or software configuration, so when you return a part you are 100% sure it is defective before the vendor finds that out and return it to you with that kind of dizzy information.

 

The safest way to determine if a part is defective, is to check it out on another machine that is known to work.

 

You may be lucky and the drive is defective, but it is a risk left that your PSU build by seasonic reselled by corsair may be caused an OP (overpower) or OV (overwoltage)... im not saying it is ... some folks again might ask if i had a problem with corsair-psu's ... the german subsidiary actually searching for testers and i signed up but I fear they only choose commercial-hardware-review-bloggers ... so actually i have no opinion about corsair-psu and probably will never have, because im not going to pay seasonic anything until they proved me that they dont kill hardware from time to time, because thats what seasonic-OEMs in OEM-PCs are famous for. because whenever i review the system-specs of someone who had sudden hardware deaths in many of the times there is a really cheap OEM-PSU causing the outage. Maybe im just confused, but anytime I see someone saying "my disk suddenly died" here in the forum in 90% of the cases, there's a Corsair-PSU in place. Just my impression :D:

 

The point is it may be a a good quality product by paper/spec... but... it might be sampled in the same factories with cheap workers that likely have no proper social-insurance despite a proper loan and the factory-owners are greedy, like anyone on this planet. so from time to time too it may happen that high quality product-parts "accidentially" get replaced by cheaper parts either to maintain production flow or simply cut production costs further more.

 

I suggest you pay the very most attention on your PSU, it might not be relevance in manners of performance, still it's the most important component in your system.

 

Always verify you have ALL available protections, dont review the Specs and say to yourself 4 protections or 5 protections is enough, you can never have enough PSU-Protection.

 

Lets say you have all, still some actually simply may not properly work and you dont see it, there's no warning when OP/OV/UV-Protection would not work... normally PSU's dont have a speaker or a display or LEDs or even a Data-Port... nothing. We - the costumers - just assume, that all protections are properly working becuase it is inside the spec-sheet. ;):

 

Always verify you have QUIETE more PSU-Target-Peak and Constant available than your maximum constant power-usage theoretically can achieve, because the classification in the product name is what it is a brand-name-classication... in most of the times it does not show what what the PSU really is capable of, either it's max-peak and the max. constant is far lower, or it is combined power on all lanes, so it would only provide that much if the system is plugged at all lanes.

 

Anway, if corsair technically could tell you "a PSU caused the death" and would refuse a replacement, you can say "oh really, let me see, it's a corsair", seems legit thell replace anything at their cost, espacially to their "fans" :D:

 

I have to say I am a fan of cases and PSUs from chief-tec since killed my TAGAN480 with OCCT-PSU-Stress.

 

Non the less all Brand-PSUs going to be build by the OEM-manufacturers. Even corsair has models from channel-well, and mine actual is from channel-well to. I know that. So in my opinion a bad Brand-PSU can reach you from any resellers... and it's not there fault.

 

So best way is to check at least on one another computer especially with another mainboard and another PSU. If it returns the same, the SSD seems to be defect. Well but that doesn't tell you what part caused the defect, because in an electronical system theoretically any component fault may be the real cause of another ones going defective. :(:

 

Normally a software-layer app like Bitlocker is not capable of destructing a drive physically in terms it's not going to be detected by any computer. The cause even might came from external infrastructural source at all (think of a lightning-strike hitting your house, or a current-peak from your provider, or power-frequential-problems, or bad/old inhouse-power-cables).

 

The problem you encounter mostly is caused by power-failures in some way or simply by a defect drive... ;):

[chris.suttles]

I really wish I had another system to pop the SSD into, but sadly I do not. Right now I am running Ubuntu off a USB drive on my desktop just to be able to browse the web.

 

I don't have a PSU tester, and am a little too scared to try testing the leads manually by myself using a volt meter. I might pick one up this weekend, as it is sort of a must have tool.

 

But all three of my SATA III HDDs and my DVD/RW drive work on all ports with the same cable and SATA power connector and the SSD does not. I will chaulk this one up to drive failure for now, esepcially since bitlocker does not seem to be the problem.

[Tzvia]

Nothing coming off an assembly line is ever going to have a 100% perfect rate. Hopefully this was just a case of you getting the rare bad one.

 

As for encryption, I see less use for whole drive encryption on a desktop than I do for a laptop. I mean, the desktop sits at home, right? Maybe at a high traffic location at work, where the worry is that the drive will run off with someone, encrypting the drive makes sense. But at a location where its physical placement is not an issue, I would skip whole drive encryption in favor of encryption software that creates an encrypted folder. Save your sensitive docs (tax papers, medical records, stuff with CC numbers...) to that folder and they encrypt, requiring a password to open. Something geared more for preventing some trojan from finding and sending this data to some hacker in the Ukraine.

 

I'm in IT, and we have maybe 600 laptops locally, and 10s of thousands of laptops all over the world using whole drive encryption. Yes, there is extra overhead and drive activity slowing the laptop and yes there can be problems. Our drive failure rate went up when the business specified that all laptops be encrypted, and it became harder to fix OS issues where it fails to boot. Can't just run the install CD to get in and try and fix, or slave the drive to recover data, unless the other computer is encrypted and there is a mechanism in the software to allow you to log into the slaved drive. So while whole drive encryption can be one of many good security options in the toolkit, it comes with it's own set of potential issues, so I would only suggest it if the physical security of the asset is in question, and in that case, a good man-trap would probably be even more important to implement. If the worry is with virus/trojan 'stealing' data, whole drive encryption won't help, folder encryption that requires a password to open would be better.

[peanutz94]

You may be lucky and the drive is defective, but it is a risk left that your PSU build by seasonic reselled by corsair may be caused an OP (overpower) or OV (overwoltage)... im not saying it is ... some folks again might ask if i had a problem with corsair-psu's ... the german subsidiary actually searching for testers and i signed up but I fear they only choose commercial-hardware-review-bloggers ... so actually i have no opinion about corsair-psu and probably will never have, because im not going to pay seasonic anything until they proved me that they dont kill hardware from time to time, because thats what seasonic-OEMs in OEM-PCs are famous for. because whenever i review the system-specs of someone who had sudden hardware deaths in many of the times there is a really cheap OEM-PSU causing the outage. Maybe im just confused, but anytime I see someone saying "my disk suddenly died" here in the fo

. rum in 90% of the cases, there's a Corsair-PSU in place. Just my impression

 

Umm...It's a Corsair forum. 90% of the people here own more than one corsair product. But to make an insinuation that it is a Corsair PSu causing drive deaths or any other component failure is a really far stretch.