PNY SSD problem

[mc2fool]

So I bought a PNY CS900 240GB SSD from PC World for my HP W10/Home laptop 11 months ago, and it appears to have gone belly up.

The laptop was just sitting there, doing its weekly automatic full Macrium backup as it happens, and when I next looked it was at a BIOS screen, with the message:

SMART Hard Disk Error. The SMART hard disk check has detected an imminent failure. To ensure not (sic) data loss, please backup the content immediately and run the Hard Disk Test in System Diagnostics. Hard Disk 1 (301)

and the options to run diagnostics or continue startup. The latter gets me: Boot Device Not Found. Please install an operating system on your hard disk. Hard Disk (3F0), and running the diagnostics immediately gets me: SMART Check: Not Available with Short/Long DST: Warning for the quick/extensive tests respectively.

Ok, so it's less than a year old, supposedly has a 3 year warranty, and the PNY site says that in the first 12 months the Warranty will be serviced by the Distributor, and I have backups up to yesterday's differential, so I can just traipse down to my local PC World and demand a replacement. However, I thought before I do that I'll try opening up my W10/Pro desktop and plugging the SSD into a spare SATA cable there.

The BIOS on the desktop sees the drive and gets its size right, the POST doesn't complain at all and the diagnostics (which appear to just do a full read of the drive) pass ok, however it doesn't present the drive in the boot menu. On booting Windows (from the normal C drive on the PC) the PNY SSD doesn't show up at all in Explorer, and under Disk Management I initially get Disk 1. Unknown. Not Initialized. but then after doing a Rescan Disks that changes to Disk 1. Unknown. 223.57 GB Not Initialized. 223.57 GB Unallocated.

I.e. it starts as 1 in https://www.m3datarecovery.com/raw-driv ... lized.html and on a rescan changes to 2.

DISKPART sees the disk, as 223GB with 223GB free, but says there are no partitions.

So ... I could just try re-initializing the disk and then try restoring the Macrium backups and see how that goes, or I could try some of the plethora of advice on the net about fixing the MBR and recovering data (although most freeware seems to be limited to a few GB, and I'm not interested in paying for more as I have the backups I can restore), or....

As anything I try is likely to be a one-shot and irreversible, I thought I'd ask here if anyone has any experience and/or advice first.

[Breelander]

...or I could try some of the plethora of advice on the net about fixing the MBR and recovering data (although most freeware seems to be limited to a few GB, and I'm not interested in paying for more as I have the backups I can restore), or....

As anything I try is likely to be a one-shot and irreversible, I thought I'd ask here if anyone has any experience and/or advice first.

No experience of a dead/dying SSD, but I have come across a free, unlimited, Open Souce 'undelete' utility that boasts amongst other things an...

Unreasonably large scan button

http://kickassundelete.sourceforge.net/

[mc2fool]

No experience of a dead/dying SSD, but I have come across a free, unlimited, Open Souce 'undelete' utility that boasts amongst other things an...

Unreasonably large scan button

http://kickassundelete.sourceforge.net/

Ah, right ...

It's not totally clear it's dead/dying. It may just be that the partition table and/or boot record has got corrupted. Got any thoughts on anything other than just trying got reinitialize the disk to test that?

[Breelander]

I've not used them myself, but I've seen these tools recommended before...

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

https://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/

[Infrasonic]

When I had my SSD failure one of the things I found out during my reading around was that many of the current crop of cheap SSD's are DRAM less, which can cause issues with wear levelling, often resulting in early failure.
My dead (as a parrot) drive wasn't one of them, but it did put me off buying one of the uber cheapies that were all over the place pre xmas. My RMA'd replacement has a DRAM cache and from new would have had a 5 year warranty.

So for SSD boot drives I'm definitely going to be a bit more cautious in future because of the level of writes Windows tends to do, maybe the cheapies are OK for external USB use, 120GB are still around for £20ish.

[chas49]

Admittedly not an answer to the exact question in the OP, but is there any point in trying to fix it when (possibly) it may fail again later in the warranty period? Given you have the backups, I would just go for the warranty replacement (hopefully with not much hassle?)

[mc2fool]

Admittedly not an answer to the exact question in the OP, but is there any point in trying to fix it when (possibly) it may fail again later in the warranty period? Given you have the backups, I would just go for the warranty replacement (hopefully with not much hassle?)

Yes, I'd come to the same conclusion ... even if I'd got it working again I'd be forever nervous it was just waiting to fail again. I made a few attempts, just out of curiosity, all to no avail, but had already decided I'd replace it anyway.

So, marched down to PC World, where I got it, this morning and handed it over, with receipt, and told 'em it was duff. No problems, other than the slight annoyance that when I asked for a refund rather than a direct replacement (so I could get one from a different manufacturer), they'd only give me the refund on a gift card.

I paid £77 for it, so I got a gift card for that amount, £58 of which I immediately used on a Samsung EVO 250GB SSD, leaving me a "free" £19 to spend on something at PC World at some point.

The new SSD is now in my laptop and the Macrium restore is currently underway ... fingers crossed for it all going well!