SSD goes AWOL

[Jay Freedman]

In my desktop tower, I have a Crucial brand 256 GB solid state drive that I use to store the files for a few virtual machines. Occasionally -- a few times a year, but twice in the last three days -- the drive "disappears" as if it has been unplugged. It isn't visible even in the BIOS screen. When this happens, I power down the computer, open the box, pull the drive's data cable and plug it back in, and power up again, and the drive is available (until the next time).

This flaky drive used to be the system drive until the second time this happened, so I got another SSD (Plextor this time) for the system drive and demoted the Crucial to VM duty. While the drive is running it seems perfectly OK -- both chkdsk and the SMART indicators say it's healthy -- but then without warning it just drops out.

One other point: The Crucial is now plugged into a different SATA port on the motherboard than it was when it was the system drive, but using the same data cable. The behavior followed the drive and cable, while the Plextor (on the port where the Crucial used to be) is just fine.

Any clues about what's happening, or troubleshooting tools that may help, are welcome.

[Rudi]

This is not my field, but what the heck...let's just throw some options out. Maybe you overlooked one.

On reading about this (for 20 odd minutes) it seems to boil down to these scenarios:

- Replacing the cable
- Updating to newest firmware and BIOS
- Make sure in your power management settings that the SSD is set to never turn off
- Check BIOS power management settings (Drives can drop due to lack of power to it).

Hope you find the cause and a solution.
Cheers

[Jay Freedman]

Thanks, Rudi.

The possibility that the cable is the culprit occurred to me as I was writing the post. I'll try switching it with one of the other drives' cables (the tower has four SATA drives, and one of them is rarely used). It could take quite a while to find out whether it makes a difference. I'll also check the other suggestions.