SSD drive stopped working after 7 hours

My crucial M4 512 Gb SSD drive arrived today. I had my mid 2010 MacBook Pro 13 inch running Mountain lion 10.8.2 completely backed up with several other LaCie hard drive backups. I put the 512 Gb SSD into a transcend SATA USB housing. I plug this into the MacBook Pro using one USB as well as two USB plugs. Since it seemed to work fine with just one USB plug that's how I first formatted it using Disk Utility and then I ran a SuperDuper! backup. It took about seven hours to fully backup and make a bootable copy with about 335 Gb loaded. After this was completed I was able to copy files onto it and then still connected with USB booted my MacBook from this. Even connected with USB it was notably faster in opening programs like Word and Excel.

I then shut down my MacBook and plugged the Transcend housing with the Crucial SSD into my eight-year-old PowerBook G4 12 inch. I changed the name so that it would be identical to the hard drive I had on my MacBook. (I had originally called it a slightly different name then the main internal 5400 RPM hard drive on my MacBook Pro. But now I wanted to change it and make it the exact same name because I was going to put it inside the MacBook Pro). I ejected this but then decided to plug it back in just to check to see if it was faster on the PowerBook as well even though of course I wouldn't be able to boot from it. At this time it was not recognized by the PowerBook. I took it over to the MacBook Pro and it was also not recognized with either one or two USB plugs for power. Disk utility did not see this SSD– it was like it was not there.

Nonetheless I said let me try to put it inside the MacBook Pro because it's perhaps something to do with the transcend housing circuitry. I did that it was very easy to do but nothing. It was not seen by the MacBook Pro and even though I tried three times to start it I never even saw the Apple sign nothing it just sat there up to 10 minutes.

I took it out and put the original 500 Gb 5400 RPM Seagate internal drive and everything works perfectly. But of course not the SSD drive that seems to be dead even though I have 335 Gb a very personal data on this drive.

So what happened? Did the PowerBook somehow "burnout" the SSD drive?? I purchased this through Amazon in France, I live in Belgium but I think this has a three-year warranty I guess I just have to figure out who to send it back to. And also how to erase this drive because I have passwords and many other things on this drive.

I am willing to try anything to try to get this drive to be recognized. I appreciate any and all comments, including, if I have to send it back, how I can erase the data which I believe is on there. And is this just a fluke? Why did it work for seven hours and then suddenly fail to be recognized?

Thanks for any comments I am just shaking my head in disbelief. A week ago my friend and I took an exact similar Crucial M4 512 SSD and put it in his six-year-old iMac. It worked perfectly and has worked perfectly for him all week and that encouraged me to order one and it was fine the first seven hours. What happened??

I feel completely lost and sick to the stomach.

Best regards,

Steve

9 March 2013

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion, Also a Mac SE running 6.0.4 - not upgrading that!

Posted on Mar 8, 2013 4:01 PM

19 replies

Mini-Mac

Level 3

825 points

Mar 10, 2013 6:00 AM in response to Shootist007

Just to add my experience with Crucial M4 (256GB) SSD. I custom-ordered a New MBP in July 2012 (15.4" 2.6GHz i7 HR Anti-Glare USB 3.0) and a New Crucial M4. After starting the new MBP to insure everything was good I installed the SSD. No TRIM enabled....nada.

Now 8 months later NO problems what so ever with either MBP or M4. My SSD firmware is still at 000F and don't plan to upgrade any time soon......From what I've read on Crucial's forums any firmware after 000F has caused many issues with stability, and that's why I haven't upgraded.

My backup plan is SD (weekly), and TM. All of my (important) data is on my Synology DS and is synced with Cloud Station to a MBP 15.4" and 13.3" MB Air.

My point is the M4 (FW 000F) at least for me has been 100% reliable.

Good luck!

Mar 10, 2013 8:57 AM in response to Mini-Mac

I've had nothing but good luck with my 152GB Crucial M4 since I purchased it last April - and I do all the firmware updates (now up to 040H) with no problems. But I do keep two Time Machine backups and three CCC backups just in case anything does go wrong.

I'm planning on (and budgeting for) purchasing the new Crucial 961GB M500 SSD whenever it ships. It's going to be wonderful to have access to my entire iTunes library when I'm disconnected from my external drives.

Clinton

Mar 10, 2013 9:29 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

OK, but if you meant to change the subject, you need to emphasize that you are changing the subject. Every other post on this thread has been about the Original Poster's trouble with his SSD, so if you meant to talk about similar (but not identical) devices, you needed to club the reader over the head with the concept of RELATED devices, not just strictly SSDs.

No, you just took one sentence out of context, that's all. No disrespect, but that's exactly what happened. Read carefully please. It was a comparison based sentence used as to bring fact to an outside similarly based technology device. Flash memory is flash memory. It's all the same, how it's controlled and what speed it is are the differences between an SSD and a standard memory stick. That said, subjecting SSD users to scopes of behavior outside the norms of what they're expecting with other flash memory based drives and/or traditional drives these SSD are supposed to replace is not satisfactory, especially since other SSD manufacturers don't have this issue. Crucial is just blowing smoke up your you know what... they just need to fix their issues and anything else is just crap they're telling you to keep you from RMAing the drive.

Mar 10, 2013 9:33 AM in response to clintonfrombirmingham

Great to hear! Could you (if you have time) write a brief step-by-step instruction on how you do the firmware updates? I think you download the file, burn it to a DVD then… not sure but somehow that DVD becomes the startup disk or have I got that wrong. I'm on the latest firmware (came with the SSD) but I know I'll have to update it someday!

Thanks!

Best regards,

Steve Schulte

Sunday 10 March 2013

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SSD drive stopped working after 7 hours