Two SSD's down at the same time?

ozone0

Honorable
Sep 8, 2013
6
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10,510
I had two identical SSD's. They are Crucial M4 256 GB drives. One was the C: and the other was a linux drive, that I changed to a data drive D:. Fortunately it was not very full. Anyway, I started getting blue screens of death. I could still use the computer if I rebooted, but after much diagnosis, I believe the C: drive was going bad (probably controller). I bought a new SSD, reloaded windows onto it, setting up things from scratch (no cloning). After setting some things up, I inserted the old C: into the system so I could get some things off of it and see what I was missing from the new SSD.

All of the sudden both the old C: drive and the D: drive drop from the system. What are the chances that both would break at the same time? Could it be a problem with the Marvel control software or is it the motherboard? So far the rest of the system seems to be working fine. The new SSD and an old HDD are accessible. If I reboot the drives come back and I'm in the process of backing up that data, but I would hate to just toss the two SSD's. They were expensive and useful.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
Solution
If you continue to have problems I would move the drives off the marvel controller as several vesions of their sata3 controller have issues with these high speed (450mb/'s+) drives. Be sure to change the driver before you move the drives otherwise windows wont boot. Msahci or iastor should be fine for an intel bd and amdsata for an amd board.

I did not say I could not boot with both drives. In fact, booting is what works. After being booted for a time and even using the two suspect drives a bit, they drop from the system and then windows explorer crashes. The last time both drives disappeared from the system. Just now only the old C: drive (not the new C: the one that used to be the C: ) fell off the system and the D: was there, but again, explorer crashed and I had to force a shut down. I'm confident if I booted the system now, both drives would function. . . but it won't last long.

The data is what is most important to me, but it just seems odd that the drives seem to work just fine and then don't. I know it is the controllers that usually die on SSD's but because both drives are affected at times, I was wondering if it could be something different; something common to both. Maybe firmware or the motherboard. I don't know.
 


I still haven't looked into these programs yet, but I had a friend tell me he'd had a similar situation and thought it was the motherboard having a problem with some of the SATA ports but not all. He gave me a PCI to SATA adapter card. I put it in my computer and I could see the drives. I waited a few hours and to my surprise, they both dropped off of the system again. I still think despite their identical nature, that it is too coincidental that they both drop off together. There is a Marvel driver that is common to both of them. Could that be it? I plan on doing a little research on that.

In the meantime I've installed a new larger SSD and things are working fine, except I had to set everything up again.
 
I think it was the firmware. I installed new firmware on one drive and it didn't have any problems. I just installed the new firmware on the second one. I've left it on over night. I should know in the morning if it worked on that one too. I expect it to work perfectly. We'll see.
 
If you continue to have problems I would move the drives off the marvel controller as several vesions of their sata3 controller have issues with these high speed (450mb/'s+) drives. Be sure to change the driver before you move the drives otherwise windows wont boot. Msahci or iastor should be fine for an intel bd and amdsata for an amd board.
 
Solution
Solved: It is now December 2013 and the system is running perfectly. Updating the firmware on each drive brought them back to life in my old configuration, no data loss. Why they failed in the first place is a mystery. Probably a Windows update or something. Anyway, it was the firmware!

Thanks to all that helped.