Dead SSD?

[FlamesPuck12]

I've had my Intel 160 GB SSD for about a year now and it's been acting up recently.

It started couple days ago with some of my applications crashing (or not even starting up saying the application was corrupt). So I decided to reboot my Mac but then beyond the Apple logo, my MacBook Pro would just shut off.

After using disk util in recovery mode, disk verification failed, and disk repair failed as well, saying I need to restore from my Time Machine. So I decided to overwrite my SSD with the latest copy of my Time Machine and then it would boot fine after that.

As soon as restoring was complete, I went back to disk util and tried verification and it kept failing the verification (I had a feeling that next time I rebooted, it wouldn't start up. So I kept it in sleep mode for couple days until I had time to investigate a bit further).

So as expected, couple days later, it failed to boot up when I rebooted. So at this point I wasn't quite sure if it was OS related files that went corrupt or if it was SSD so I decided to try a clean install from scratch after deleting the partition and recreating the partition.

After completing the clean install, I started to install my apps and moving data over and everything seems fine and it boots up fine. As I was installing SC2, I kept getting errors saying that it can't write to the disc at different parts. Sometimes it would get stuck at 84%, sometimes as early as 20%.

So does this sound like this SSD is pretty much dead? My friend suggested that it might be a faulty/dead SATA cable, since he had couple incidents with those before.

[photon]

Sounds like it could be the SSD or the laptop controller too.

For the SSD you should be able to do a factory erase, different manufacturers have different methods, you could give that a try.

You could also try the original HDD, just to see if it's the laptop or the SSD.

[FlamesPuck12]

Yeah, I've been trying to look at Intel SSD Toolbox or whatever their tool was but apparently this was only available on Windows and I don't have a Windows partition.

The next step I'm trying to take is use my HDD that came with it (which is currently my external HD as well as time machine) but I'm having all sorts of partitioning problem with that. Apparently Disk Util won't let me partition the thing the way I want it to so I'm currently looking into fdisk.


Edit: Also, what do you mean by the laptop controller?

[photon]

Just the chip on the laptop that talks to the SSD or HDD, sometimes those will go bad (though not often, more likely the drive or the cable, but you never know).

Yeah most of the SSD tools I've seen are Windows only, which is annoying, they should at least make a linux version so you can just download a boot CD or flash drive.

[Hack&Lube]

The Intel SSDs have a known bug but your issues don't sound like the problem that most people had.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21299

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21349

[Hack&Lube]

I have the same drive as you and I've found the SSD Toolbox quite good but as you said, it's only for Windows.

The warranty should be decent on Intel products though so hopefully you can get it replaced via RMA.

[FlamesPuck12]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I have the same drive as you and I've found the SSD Toolbox quite good but as you said, it's only for Windows.

The warranty should be decent on Intel products though so hopefully you can get it replaced via RMA.

Yeah, the warranty is 5 years so Intel apparently has a lot of confidence in the reliability of their SSDs. It's just a hassle to send it in for a replacement.