[SOLVED] My SSD is dying... or dead.

[refriedfood]

So, I have a 1TB SSD as my main partition and OS device. I noticed lately that my OS was slowing at certain times, and even pausing completely and having to be hard rebooted. Sometimes I would let it sit for 24 hours to see if it worked itself out but to no avail. I've tried all the tricks just to get to this point: convinced it's I/O errors and the drive is dying. I've done ram tests, bad sectors tests, cable tests, different sata ports, AHCI to IDE/PIO, clone, etc. all the same result. Every time I try to copy the SSD data it pauses at 1% and goes no further. I've also tried running chkdsk to see if it would fix it and instead I receive i/o errors and it can't continue.

I've booted into Hiren's and ran multiple test, even the mini xp option just to copy to another drive for safety, and I still for the life of me cannot get past the 1%. It just stops transferring. I took another drive and installed win10 on it, making the SSD a slave to try and copy over the files (to pretend as though it's another machine), same result...

So, as of right now, I've got the SSD as a slave partition I so desperately need only a few things off of (around 400GB), but they can't be read or copied, and another drive with windows 10 on it in which I'm trying to copy them to.

I've been wrestling with this crap for hours and I'm at a loss (which is why I'm here). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here are the specs:
Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz (LGA 1155) Cpu ASUS P8Z77-V Mobo
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 2133 (PC3 17000)
CORSAIR H80 (CWCH80) Liquid Cooler
Gloway STK Sata 3 SSD 1TB
Seagate 500GB 7,200rpm Barracuda (temp main os)
EVGA 1000 GQ 80+ GOLD 1000watt (210-GQ-1000-V1)

 

[popatim]

Have you tried another destination drive in case that is having issues too?

 

[USAFRet]

Sounds like a dead drive.

 

[refriedfood]

Yes, I have. there were more than 4 drives in the box I tested, trying to transfer the data. Last I checked, about 10 minutes ago, the OS was having problems even detecting the drive and giving it a drive letter due to i/o... ugh.

 

[davelee3]

My Lenovo (Micron C300) 128gb SSD ATA Sata drive inside my Lenovo laptop died this week, experiencing almost exactly the same symptoms as your 1tb drive had just before your I/O stopped recognizing it as a drive. Up until this week, I truly thought that SSD drives were better and lasted forever simply because there are no moving parts versus conventional platter drives with magnetic heads. Much to my surprise, after reading several forums and watching YouTube videos posted from others who have also experienced the sudden death of their SSD drives, I was shocked to learn that SSD drives deteriorate little by little with each and every read/write activity! I had absolutely NO idea that SSD drives do this. I thought I lost all my important data files until I discovered (during my YouTube search on this topic) a business in California called "$300 Data Recovery" which can recover 99% of a completely dead SSD drive (that's almost all files on the drive) using some very expensive hardware called a PC-3000 made by "ACELabs" which bypasses the dead SSD drive's bios chip and is able to read the SSD data memory chips directly. Apparently this is the proven method to extract the data files that are still preserved on the SSD's memory chips without actually physically removing those memory chips and reading each chip data individually... a much more expensive and time-consuming task that typically takes weeks to accomplish by a professional... versus the hours it typically takes a company using the ACELabs PC-3000 to extract the data files from a dead SSD with the memory chips intact.

 

[USAFRet]

My Lenovo (Micron C300) 128gb SSD ATA Sata drive inside my Lenovo laptop died this week, .....

The actual "proven method" is to have and manage your own backups.
Cheap and reliable.

 

[davelee3]

The actual "proven method" is to have and manage your own backups.
Cheap and reliable.

Hahaha... no argument there.. touché

 

[fzabkar]

I thought I lost all my important data files until I discovered (during my YouTube search on this topic) a business in California called "$300 Data Recovery" which can recover 99% of a completely dead SSD drive (that's almost all files on the drive) using some very expensive hardware called a PC-3000 made by "ACELabs" which bypasses the dead SSD drive's bios chip and is able to read the SSD data memory chips directly.

I doubt that he charges US$300 for such jobs. Did you check?

This fellow originally limited his business model to "logical" recoveries, ie those recoveries that utilise regular software that anyone can afford. He used to outsource "physical" recoveries to a DR shop down the street.

 

[USAFRet]

Hahaha... no argument there.. touché

"which can recover 99% of a completely dead SSD drive "

Have you actually seen that in action?

 

[fzabkar]

"which can recover 99% of a completely dead SSD drive "

Have you actually seen that in action?

I have witnessed several threads at HDD Guru where this is explained.

Apparently, when NAND cells become unreadable, the firmware loses track of the relationship between LBAs and physical NAND blocks. This is called the Flash Translation Table, or "translator". The FTL is in constant flux due to wear levelling. When the FTL is corrupt, the SSD goes into "panic" mode and will often identify itself with a reduced capacity and a factory alias, eg "Barefoot".

You can see numerous examples here:

vlo.name:3000/hw/ssd/rommode/

PC3000 gets around this problem by forcing the SSD into "safe mode", and uploading code called a "loader". The PC3000 software then communicates with the SSD's loader and constructs a "virtual translator".

 

[USAFRet]

I have witnessed several threads at HDD Guru where this is explained.

Right.
But relying on a utube vid and ad copy from that guys website stating "99%" is a whole lot different than actually seeing a recovered drive, with all (or 99%) of the data, in its original configuration and folder/subfolder/subfolder.

10GB of original data, and 9.9GB of recovered "data" does not necessarily mean actual usable files were recovered.
I've seen this in practice, testing various consumer level recovery tools.
Recuva, PhotoRec, Autopsy, etc.


I'd have to see the results of that "$300" thing before I'd believe it.

 

[fzabkar]

Just FYI, here is a log which shows how PC3000 builds a virtual translator for a Kingston SSD with a Phison PS3108 controller:

https://forum.hddguru.com/download/file.php?id=19344

In this case PC3000 was unsuccessful, but the procedure is still informative.

 

[Johnpombrio]

I don't see that there is much that you can do at this point. If you have booted off another drive and your SSD is just plugged into a SATA port but does not read correctly, there is damn all you can do to"fix" it. If it is a Samsung drive, Samsung magician has a diagnostic scan. You have certainly done the other things I would have tried like chkdsk and Hiren. There Is a sector by sector read tools that I used in the past on hard drives that I was sucessful in retrieving my data. Google "Sector by sector read of SSD" to find some tools that may help. Good luck but please learn to back up important information on the web and also on hard media. Working at HP, I have seen a company go out of business by not bothering to back up.

 

[fzabkar]

I stand corrected.

I checked the "$300 Dollar" web site and he does indeed offer a flat $300 data recovery for those SSDs which have "firmware" problems and which can be recovered with PC3000.