Question Samsung 970 evo plus on read only after BSOD (1 year use).

[Farouk Sakhnini]

So basically title explains all, I decided to get on my PC today after turning it off completely normally the day before, no windows updates nothing, just turned it off after a casual gaming session, and it turned on to a BSOD. It gave me no options to boot in safe mode or anything so I realized that there was something corrupted with the windows, after troubleshooting for a bit I came to the conclusion that my Windows got messed up and I prob should just format it and make a new one, thinking it was just as easy but apparently not. I downloaded the media creation tool on a usb drive rom my laptop, booted up from it on my PC and got into the installation, as soon as I came to the allocation space bit I was met with errors up errors, I wasn't even able to click on format, the button was greyed out, it was only delete that was there for me to click, I would click delete, click new to allocate space, and as soon as I would click ok I would get an error so basically I couldn't get past that part and put windows on my M.2, so I googled to do some more troubleshooting, and figured out my M.2 was on read-only and that I couldn't write on it. Tried doing all sorts of troubleshoots, attribute disk, chkdsk, clean, format you name it, nothing worked, everything would say successfully to me and the M.2 would still be on read-only or it give me back "access denied the drive is write protected".

I looked up several posts on several forums platforms and found a couple that have similarities to what happened with me and most get replies as such "the m.2 died". I'm not sure what to do right now, I've had the M.2 for just over a year so far, bought it October 2021. Really mind boggled as to how an M.2 can just die randomly for no apparent reason, no downloads, no updates, nothing just turn off my pc completely fine, wake up next day to a dead m.2, guess it might've had nightmares or something no clue...

Seeking suggestions as to what I can do, I think it's still under warranty, I called up the shop and they told me to send the drive to them so they can get it checked out and if something is wrong with it they'll send a new one, but I'm more worried about the data on it, there's important data that I cant format or do anything with, and I'm unable to download another OS on my PC to another drive as the other drive I have in my PC is an HDD that's 4TB and it's basically filled to the brim, don't want to mess around with it and put windows on it and it gets formatted or something messes up with the drive and corrupts the data.

 

[Lutfij]

Considering the drive is 1 year old, and you still have plenty of time pending on the warranty expiration(though I'm assuming you are being served a 3~5 year warranty on the drive, please check with your receipt or your seller to verify your warranty period), I'd advise on RMA'ing the drive.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I called up the shop and they told me to send the drive to them so they can get it checked out and if something is wrong with it they'll send a new one,
but I'm more worried about the data on it, there's important data that I cant format or do anything with

This situation is quite standard.
SSD fails and locks itself. You can still recover all data from it.

If you're doing RMA, then you also give up all your personal data. You have no way of making sure, your data doesn't get abused.
Or you forget about warranty and just get a new drive. Clone from failed drive to new one. And operation of your system is restored.

Me personally - I'd just eat the cost of new drive rather than risking my personal data.

 

[fzabkar]

I suspect that the SMART report for the drive will show a non-zero value for Media and Data Integrity Errors. The Available Spare will probably be below the threshold of 10%.

You could use CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl to retrieve the SMART report.,