Corrupted files on SSD = Failing SSD?

[brutalspoon]

Hi everyone,

So, I've had my 128GB OCZ Solid2 Series SSD for 8 months now, and it's been great. Fast boot times, fast app/game loading, no noise, the works; my SSD has been awesome.

Over the last couple of days, though, I've started to have some worrying problems, namely some seemingly corrupted files. I haven't come across any corrupted documents so far, but apart from what's in my Dropbox folder pretty much all my files apart from applications are kept on a local fileserver and on other conventional hard drives.

I've had three games which have reported corrupted installations so far - a Tower Defence game I bought on Steam, StarCraft II and Battlefield Bad Company 2. The first refused to even start up, throwing up an error dialog box and forcing me to reinstall it, SCII crashed halfway through a game saying that it needed to repair my SCII installation, and BC2 simply crashes just before I join a server with no warning or errors at all.

The first time it happened I thought "huh. That's strange." When SCII crashed with a similar error some warning bells started to ring, but now it's happened with 3 different applications and I'm starting to freak out a little. So, I thought I'd come to the good ol' Tom's Hardware forums to ask you guys for some advice.

What do you think? Am I just being paranoid, or do you think there's something wrong with my SSD?

Thanks in advance as always,
BrutalSpoon

 

[EnderWiggin]

No, I don't think you are being paranoid, I would start to suspect the same thing too if that happened to me. Are there any fireware updates for your model? If so aply the update. Does OCZ offer a software tool that scans for bad sectors on their SSD drives? If not contact their Tech Support about a tool and the problem you are having. At least if it is still under warranty you can get a replacement.

 

[sminlal]

Run a utility like "DiskCheckup" to view the drives' SMART data. If there are reallocated or pending sectors then you may have a problem with the drive.

 

[brutalspoon]

No, I don't think you are being paranoid, I would start to suspect the same thing too if that happened to me. Are there any fireware updates for your model? If so aply the update. Does OCZ offer a software tool that scans for bad sectors on their SSD drives? If not contact their Tech Support about a tool and the problem you are having. At least if it is still under warranty you can get a replacement.

Thanks for the reply - yes, there is a firmware update which I'll try soon.

Run a utility like "DiskCheckup" to view the drives' SMART data. If there are reallocated or pending sectors then you may have a problem with the drive.

Just downloaded, installed and ran DiskCheckup. I can't seem to make much sense of it, so I've linked to it below. I'd appreciate it if you or somebody else could have a look and see if anything looks particularly bad:

DriveInfo.txt - hosted at MediaFire

I know the link looks a little shady, but it looks like an absolute mess copied straight into here and there doesn't seem to be a way to attach the file.

 

[nforce4max]

This is why you should always do back ups of your data on another physical drive regardless of income. Second as one had already said check the smart data with HD tune ect.

 

[brutalspoon]

This is why you should always do back ups of your data on another physical drive regardless of income. Second as one had already said check the smart data with HD tune ect.

As I said, the only I data I've got on my SSD is applications and the contents of my dropbox folder (which is backed up on 3 different computers and a web server), and I've got that backed up on my server, too. That's not the issue here. The issue is that my £180 SSD seems to be failing, which is just generally inconvenient since, you know, it leaves me without my system drive if it fails.

Secondly, as I mentioned in my last post, I've checked the S.M.A.R.T. data but I don't know how to interpret it, which is why I put a link to it and asked if other people could look at it and tell me if anything is significantly out of order.

I'd thank you for your input but you seem to have posted only to state the obvious, say what's already been said and make assumptions about my income and through that my common sense.

Thanks in advance to anybody who takes the time to read through that S.M.A.R.T. data report.

 

[nforce4max]

OK I looked at at it and it has very little usage unless the smart data isn't being saved. As for the error rates I really can't say that the drive is failing but you never know since NAND flash cells of this size and use isn't known in terms of failure wise.

 

[brutalspoon]

OK I looked at at it and it has very little usage unless the smart data isn't being saved. As for the error rates I really can't say that the drive is failing but you never know since NAND flash cells of this size and use isn't known in terms of failure wise.

Ah, I thought that might be the case, since I couldn't spot any fields that looked useful - been reading some reviews around suggesting possible failure rates of 20-30%, but that could just be scaremonger-ing.

Could somebody please explain the different values? That is, "Value", "Worst", "Threshold" and "Raw Value"?

Ah. Just got some S.M.A.R.T. history results - "Value" and "Worst" values for Reallocated Sector Count and Current Pending Sector Count are all 100. That's not a good thing... right?

 

[nforce4max]

Do a google search on smart tables like I did and it will tell you want to pay attention to.

 

[sminlal]

The Wikipedia entry on SMART data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

I'd be concerned about the counts on IDs 198/199/200. If OCZ has a forum you might ask there to see what other users are seeing for these - but they seem pretty high to me.