Dead SSD?

[rlb9682]

I have a Falcon 128gb SSD which has worked flawlessly for me for about 6 months now. I left my computer turned on overnight and this morning it was unresponsive. I turned off my PC and restarted to find that the bios is not recognizing the SSD. I also disconnected the power and reconnected the power cable. After checking the SATA cable connections to the SSD and the motherboard I turned the pc on again and had the same lack of response.

I changed the SATA cable and changed the SATA location on my motherboard from 0 to 1 and the bios still refuses to recognize the SSD is attached. I even changed to another power connector from my Power Supply with no response.

Is this SSD suddenly dead, or is it more likely the cables or motherboard? Any advice is welcome.

[rlb9682]

Well, I had sent an email to tech support just before posting this and received this reply. I am glad they were so quick and helpful, but I'd rather this were not the case.

"Dear Customer

Sounds like the drive may be defective. Go ahead and send it in for a new replacement. Please visit our website at http://www.gskill.com/rma.php for complete RMA procedures.

Thank you
GSKILL SUPPORT"

[Podling]

Hi.
Add another dead Falcon-I 128GB to the list !

Bought mine last June & it has been fast & furious. With that speed and silence I could live with the occasional unexplained 10.0 second freezes and the daft/bogus SMART data. However, tonight I pressed 'refresh' on Firefox & FF crashed... then the PC BSOD'd... & then wouldn't reboot into Win7-32 'cos of some problem with 'NTDLL.DLL'. After a little investigation it seems that none of my PCs here can see the Falcon.

I'll try reflashing the firmware (from 1571 to 1819 (?) ), but based on what I've read on these forum pages I expect that I'll be driving over to the shop tomorrow for a replacement or refund.

Well hacked off !

PS: Last Summer most of my usual PC parts suppliers were offering G.Skill SSDs. Now none of them are. Curious...

[Podling]

Well, re-Flashed to v1819 and the SSD seems to be working again. Write speed has dropped 25% but its still good. I shall be keeping an eye on this SSD and tightening my backup schemes. Trust, once lost, is very hard to re-earn.

[bjone]

Current SSD gen might be sensitive to power cut-off when working on its internal data.

Your crash might have been caused by a power outage, corrupting its internal tables and making the firmware crash at bootup.

Since the firmware update erases flash and mapping data, it would have corrected its internal state.

[rlb9682]

Just an update; G. Skill sent me a new? replacement for my Falcon 128GB SSD. It looks new, and has a newer jumper piece that I can actually handle without the use of tweezers anyway.

So, I got this back two weeks ago and it's been running smoothly ever since. I hope this does not happen again since I lost all the data on that drive, but fortunately I had 90% of it backed up before it bit the dust. G. Skill was great about sending the replacement, but it's not something I look forward to having happen again.

[macdaddy]

Well, re-Flashed to v1819 and the SSD seems to be working again. Write speed has dropped 25% but its still good. I shall be keeping an eye on this SSD and tightening my backup schemes. Trust, once lost, is very hard to re-earn.

Just flash it back again to the 1571FW and get the performance back i did.

[Podling]

Re-Flashed the SSD on 27th Jan... & it lasted 6 days. Got a replacement under warranty. Main PC (Win7) is now flying with a Samsung SSD & the Falcon is relegated to the Entertainment (XP) machine.

Does anyone (outside of GSkill, of course) actually now why these particular SSDs are failing ?