Did OC'ing kill my two previous SSDs?

[auburn]

Here's the deal:

I used to reliably OC my i7 3770k through the BIOS setting in my ASRock Z77 EXTREME4 MOBO to 4.4 GHz back when I my boot drive was a OCZ Vertex 3 90GB SSD. It ran like a dream. Only, after aprox. 10 months the SSD BSODed on me and the BIOS wouldn't even detect it. I replaced it with a Samsung 840 series (not PRO) and OC'ed under exactly the same circumstances. Three days later the thing couldn't stand being in Windows 7 more than a couple of minutes before it BSOD'ed again. Windows repair would only delay the error. It would even go blue upon shut down sometimes.

I'm on my third SSD at the moment: a Samsung 840 PRO, and I'm downright terrified to OC the thing via the built-in BIOS setting lest the same thing happens again.

Question is, am I being paranoid? I hear it's weird for OC'ing to damage SSD drives. Though the truth is the ASRock's BIOS OC setting does raise the Bclk to 100.

Opinions? Should I leave the thing alone or give it a whirl? I kind of already miss my 4.4 GHz but that might be because I'm a greedy jerk.

 

[geofelt]

I think something else is going on.
Probably with your OC, or possibly the motherboard.
Some thoughts:
1. Check to see if there is a bios update that might address stability issues. Do not update the bios without a good reason. A failed update can brick your motherboard.
2. How is your cooling?
3. I see no reason why a OC failure should damage a ssd.
But... the OCZ ssd's used to have a higher return rate:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html
Regardless, you should be able to rma the failed ssd
4. Is your psu good? Perhaps that could be failing.
5. Motherboard easy oc capabilities are often too aggressive. Try just raising the multiplier gradually, and leave everything else on auto. 4.4 may be too high for your chip.
6. 100 is the default BCLK, increasing that changes lots of interrelated settings. I would leave it at 100, and forgo the added 2% or so that increasing it would bring.
7. Lastly, how good do you need to be? Do you really need more than 4.0?

 

[clutchc]

+1^
OC'ing the processor shouldn't affect the SSD. I'm not even sure your first 2 were bad. One of the main causes of BSODs is defective memory. Have you run memtest on the RAM? One stick at a time for at least one full pass.

 

[Buzz247]

OC the BCLK can absolutely brick an SSD and anything else on the PCI-E channels

any BCLK adjust effects whole system OC, and therefore is VERY cautiously advised on.

There certainly is a chance these were coincidental and unrelated failures, but the possibility of a causal effect is there. OC just cpu would not create this. But as soon as you start adjusting system bus speeds then that OC can turn lethal

 

[clutchc]

I guess I didn't read far enough to see he was raising the BCLK...

 

[Buzz247]

Well there's a couple of things possible here - BCLK at 100 is not really an OC per se. Anything above that is definitely. But if the ASRock bios auto jumps the timing, then it may have auto jumped the volts of the bridge as well. The combo of the 2 can be the issue.

Oddly, i have never heard of experienced any BIOS auto doing this. Something tells me a setting was left on auto and missed for this to occur. Now using a software OC program instead of UEFI BIOS, ... this i could see causing a situation like this possibly

User also states used "built in OC settings" - this makes me raise an eyebrow.
OP - set everything back to stock - find a good ASRock i7 overclock guide - I know they are out there, and follow the guide. There are some setting that should be manually set/locked and some on auto. I have a feeling this auto profile deal is part of your issue and leaving somethings on auto that should not be, or inversely, something not getting locked that needs to be. Profiles are rarely a good idea for extreme clocking (for that chip, anything above 4.2 is considered extreme by accepted standard) and encouraged to manually OC set and test anything above 4.2

 

[smorizio]

If you have a friend that has a volt meter read the voltage output on the Sata ports of your power suppy. Sounds like there spiking at power up or not holding within atx spec and frying your Ssd.

 

[auburn]

First off thank you all for the quick replies, guys. Can't tell you how helpful you're being.

Rig is running on a 600W Coolermaster and with 16G Kingston RAM which seems to be doing fine. No specific stability-fixing BIOS updates that I know of.

My need for the 4.4 GHz is relative depending on how you look at it. First, let me refer you to the greedy jerk remark above. Second, I do a lot of rendering and running 3DMax and Poser as smoothly as possible is what I aim for. Kid usually plays Sims on this computer too, and that game is famous for being a CPU power consuming beast. Still, if by OC'ing I'm risking going through this SSD dying nightmare all over again, guess I'm gonna have to learn how to live without it.

Buzz247: The Bclk never got above the 100 I mentioned, I'm absolutely sure of that. Aside from that one setting and the multiplier everything else on the OC Tweaking UEFI screen was set to Auto. I religiously left it like that, trusting the BIOS to know what it was doing. So I think you may have nailed it on the head about the auto jumping being the culprit here. Then again everything is set to Auto by default, so I never considered that to be risky. There's where I probably went wrong.

What amazes me is how long my crappy Vertex 3 was able to go on 4.4 steady (it never even went down when idle) if this is truly the cause.