[SOLVED] Friend's PC has become a graveyard for SSDs

[HarrisonHo1209]

I'm asking this question for a friend, which has had me bewildered as to why his pc seems to "kill ssds". According to him, his pc has killed 2 SSDs in the past, one of which is an sata SSD. That sata SSD survived for over a year without any problems in a different pc but died 2 months after being installed into his current pc, both SSD's disk usage would hit 100% every time he play games and he thinks that's the cause of their death. And now he claims that the same thing is happening to his hard drive. To be very clear, he has yet to back up his claim with disk usage figures from task manager. Nor has he offered me figures from CrystalDiskInfo.

So with what I know so far, I assumed he bought a cheap, dram less SSD (which turned out to be a kingston A400, 480GB model) and was just transferring large video files frequently, but what he later told me puzzled me even more and was the reason I decided to ask for help. He said that his first NVMe SSD, a samsung 970 evo, was the first SSD to "die". That's strange, considering NVMe ssds, especially samsung ones shouldn't "die" within a year, considering all he does is play games. He told me he was going to factory reset his pc, which earned him a weird look from me, since I suspect that his windows was to blame. He would have to do a fresh install of windows 10, but I'm not 100% sure if that's the cause of his problems, can anyone entertain me with a solution?

 

[rgd1101]

check what is using the disk when it is at 100%
malware scan the system?
is he not powering off correctly?

 

[847]

Try to put it on another PC like your PC, It might still work.
Or it might be a rare thing that the SSD's die like this.
I don't think it's windows 10's fault, I think it's more the motherboard's fault.

 

[makkem]

Hi
What power supply is he using?

 

[847]

I'm asking this question for a friend, which has had me bewildered as to why his pc seems to "kill ssds". According to him, his pc has killed 2 SSDs in the past, one of which is an sata SSD. That sata SSD survived for over a year without any problems in a different pc but died 2 months after being installed into his current pc, both SSD's disk usage would hit 100% every time he play games and he thinks that's the cause of their death. And now he claims that the same thing is happening to his hard drive. To be very clear, he has yet to back up his claim with disk usage figures from task manager. Nor has he offered me figures from CrystalDiskInfo.

So with what I know so far, I assumed he bought a cheap, dram less SSD (which turned out to be a kingston A400, 480GB model) and was just transferring large video files frequently, but what he later told me puzzled me even more and was the reason I decided to ask for help. He said that his first NVMe SSD, a samsung 970 evo, was the first SSD to "die". That's strange, considering NVMe ssds, especially samsung ones shouldn't "die" within a year, considering all he does is play games. He told me he was going to factory reset his pc, which earned him a weird look from me, since I suspect that his windows was to blame. He would have to do a fresh install of windows 10, but I'm not 100% sure if that's the cause of his problems, can anyone entertain me with a solution?

Do you know your friend's computer system specs? This would be helpful.

 

[Krotow]

System specs indeed would help. Especially PSU model. Also dead SSD models. Kingston A400 particularly are notorious with dying in first 2 weeks.

 

[HarrisonHo1209]

Update 1: His motherboard is an Asus ROG strix B350 gaming F. But he is unsure of the exact PSU model. He does recall it being "old". He intitally tried to install and boot windows from his 970 evo. But it won't boot, even though the rearranged the boot order many times, it won't boot from the 970 evo. So he settled with the kingston a400, he installed windows 10 and booted from that. To which he continued to install games onto the 970 evo without formatting it (which meant that the OS files were still inside, huge red flag) but not that it matters because soon steam started showing "steam disk write error" messages whenever he started installing games on the 970 evo, and then the motherboard won't even recognize the 970 evo. We don't have a spare motherboard with an M.2 slot, so we can't tell if it's truely dead or not.

Soon he removed the 970 evo, and had only 1 storage device (the kingston a400) the same problems happened to his sata ssd with windows 10 installed, where his pc could freeze, lock up. I don't have any figures to back up his 100% disk usage claim because he soon removed the sata ssd. He got himself a HDD, installed and booted windows from there, the same problems would occur. He recently decided to perform a windows factory reset, which he claims to solve his issues for now. But we all know theres more to the story than that. So the question is, is it the motherboard's fault, or is it the PSU's fault?

 

[HarrisonHo1209]

Final update, after switching his PSU to a corsair RM750x, his issues were solved. It was definitely a PSU issue.

 

[847]

Final update, after switching his PSU to a corsair RM750x, his issues were solved. It was definitely a PSU issue.

Nice! Good job!