Bad clusters on SSD - any hope?

[VC12]

I have a Crucial M4 256GB SSD that is a year old and that has become a total disaster. It has crashed my system (blue screen of death) and chkdsk has found a HUGE amount of bad clusters. I have hundreds of corrupted files on that drive now.

For what it's worth, I had TRIM enabled and was running the latest firmware version. My system is a Thinkpad T410 running Win 7 x64.

I talked to customer support and they suggested - rather stupidly IMO - to leave my laptop running BIOS overnight. Apparently that will take care of garbage collection or something. Do they really think that garbage collection will magically fix my corrupted files? Are they stupid or am I stupid?

Anyway, at this point I couldn't care less about garbage collection. My problem is what to do with all those bad clusters and how to recover my files. I do have a backup but it is a week old and I have important files that got corrupted. In other words, I'm ****** sideways. To think that I paid $420 for that piece of crap!

Does anybody have any experience how to recover files once the SSD has developed bad clusters? Is it even possible or should I just kiss my files goodbye? Is there *anything* that can be done?

 

[nhasian]

I'm not sure you will be able to recovery the data if the drive is physically defective but you can give it a try.

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[duxducis]

SSD has internal system "garbage collection or something" that will map all the bad cluster and avoid them in the future, so leaving PC running in bios will cycle this function on ssd.

It is possible to fix corrupted files thou not 100% the files will be missing some info (if the physical NAND cells that failed) you can't read from them.

so your doc file for example once restored will be missing some text, picture can be missing parts of it. all depends on types of files.

other method (depending of files and there use) would be using recovery program to find your files by names (or types) treating them as deleted files. This works on files that got catches or saved in different locations. the success of this relies on not using SSD after problem happened, and experience.

If files really important pay some good IT person to try and recover for you.
also important files needs to be auto backed up as well, My really important files auto duplicate instantly and keep 10 versions of themselves, i learned hard way long time ago

 

[JohnnyLucky]

1. Can you access and use any of those "hundreds of corrupted files" that CHKDSK is reporting? SSD's don't actually have sectors and clusters like mechanical drives. Modern ssd's have their own self-correcting features. As a result using CHKDSK for an ssd might produce misleading results.

2. How full is your ssd?

3. How much ssd capacity is alloted for overprovisioning?

 

[VC12]

Yes, I can access those files, but they are corrupted. Some I can easily see.... like pictures - they look funny. I'm not too worried about those, they haven't changed since my last backup. But other files will require quite a lot of examining - for instance my Outlook files also got corrupted, and I don't know (yet) if I lost any data.

The SSD had around 200GB of data, so about 50GB or so was free.

What is overprovisioning?

Thanks for your help, guys.