SSD drive stopped working after 7 hours

WOW.....what a fiasco.

First thing you could do is a PRAM and Power reset on your MBP. Then plug in your USB SSD drive and maybe it will recognize.

What I would have done is simple format the drive with a USB enclosure then install in you MBP. I would NOT recommend cloning at all....simply reinstall your OS then use TM or drag your files onto the SSD drive from the drive you replaced it with.

Have you tried to attach the SSD in an enclosure to your MBP and see if it is recognized in Disk Utility? If so I suggest erasing and reformatting it and start the process again.

Ciao.

You have a very small sample size. Anything could happen.

You have a very long warranty. Send it back and let it be their problem. Don't anguish over it. Stuff happens.

Well, you've tried everything else. Try the firmware update utility. If it doesn't see it, it's definitely dead.

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

Stephen Schulte1 wrote:

...Has anyone done a power cycling of an SSD drive from a MacBook Pro? If so let me know how to do it the instructions on the crucial website seem oriented towards a Windows machine...

I've never had to power cycle an SSD, let alone on a laptop (mine's in a Mac Pro), but the Crucial instructions here http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD-Knowledge/Why-did-my-SSD-quot -disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215 seem to deal with a Mac as well as PC's. Note the comment about not using a USB bus powered enclosure which sounds like what you've got and may defeat the purpose. Indeed, if I read the instructions correctly, Crucial would really prefer that you install the SSD directly in the laptop.

A better solution might be something like this: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/U3NVSPATA/ since your SSD can have power applied to it without the data connector actually being connected to anything at all (i.e., no computer necessary, which is pretty cool if it works). Looking at the instructions in the link for using desktop computers for power cycling, the emphasis seems to be on allowing "you to only connect the SATA power connection, which improves the odds of the power cycle being successful" and that's the advantage of the Startup Manager "in that it gives the drive power without any data throughput."

At the same time my suggestion of using the Universal Drive Adapter is based on my understanding of how the power cycling process is supposed to work and how the Universal Drive Adapter does work (I have two and they're very handy) and either or both understandings may be faulty, so caveat emptor.

I read through all that and it seems stupid and non-logical to do all of that to get the drive working again. No HD behaves this way and no SSD should either. Who has time to do all of that every time something like this happens. A hard drive never cares how it's powered on and even if you connect data without power there's still no issues, it simply won't show up. Once power is connected, a reboot or data disconnect/reconnect allows it to be detected again, some don't even require this (depends on BIOS/EFI of the system it's on).

If Crucial won't admit this is a firmware issue or just a high failure rate of their SSDs due to the controller on them, then they have a problem. SSDs have been known to fail a lot and most of the failures are due to the controllers being used on them as opposed to the actual flash memory on them. For the longest time Sandforce controllers sucked big time and there are still plenty of people out there who refuse to trust Sandforce when it comes to SSDs because of the high failure rate you see with them. For me personally, I go by two things reported failure rate vs firmware update frequency. If I see a ton of firmware updates for a particular product, I will wait until the next generation comes out or go buy something else. Don't get me wrong, Crucial m4 drives certainly are a bang for the buck kind of things, but when it comes to your system being as reliable with an SSD as it was with a mechanical drive, I just can't trust them. I honestly don't trust any SSD drives right now. Over the summer I'm hoping to pick up a Samsung 840 Pro, but only if the reviews stay high and the failure rates stay low. We'll see what happens.

SwankPeRFection wrote:

I read through all that and it seems stupid and non-logical to do all of that to get the drive working again. No HD behaves this way and no SSD should either. Who has time to do all of that every time something like this happens...

I couldn't agree more, with the additional thought that with something as potentially iffy as an SSD in such a critical role, I'd get it from a vendor I know is reliable and eager to make good on any problems.

It took me a while to extract what I thought was the critical information needed to arrive at a perhaps novel solution and that shouldn't be necessary at all. But in this case, the OP has a legitimate concern about wanting "to erase this drive because I have passwords and many other things on this drive" and he can't do that until he gets access to it.

While I'm really impressed by how much faster the SSD I've installed is than the HD it replaces, I've tightened up my backup cloning process in addition to TM just in case. And I've left some unused space to help out over-provisioning and give the SSD a break.

Steve, I wouldn't accept that "it's too much work and it overwhelmed the SSD" excuse from Crucial. This seems like a really bad issue due to firmware issues or otherwise. You can do whatever you want, but ask yourself if what Crucial told you is acceptable. You can take a regular old hard drive and run it 24/7/365 and do nothing but copy/deletes over and over again and it won't have this issue unless the drive fails for some reason. I wouldn't trust this type of behavior from an SSD who's technology is meant to replace that of a traditional hard drive but be faster. Also, other USB based flash memory drives don't exhibit this same type issue, EVER. There's either an issue with the controller on the Crucial or the flash memory Micron is putting in them.

Anyway, I'm just trying to make sure you don't end up with a useless brick at the most inopportune time.

Also, other USB based flash memory drives don't exhibit this same type issue, EVER

Yes, they do. The first SSD I bought came in a package that advertised on the outside, "Cloning software included!" Once opened, there was no cloning software, and there was a tech note that said, "You clone onto this drive, we tear up your warranty."

SSD drives can be overwhelmed by unrelenting data writes. They need time for garbage collection.

And anyone running an SSD needs to do something about "deleted" data. Mac OS X simply adds those blocks to the free pool, and does not clear them. This forces the SSD to continue to carry and replicate them as part of its much larger "superblocks", as if they were still valid.

One can periodically consolidate free space and immediately Zero the free space, but TRIM Enabler from groths makes a simple patch to enable TRIM for non-Apple SSDs.

Apple has not tested this with third-party SSDs, and does not endorse it. I have been running it trouble-free, but your mileage may vary. There are other TRIM solutions as well.

If you enable TRIM and then run Disk Utility ( Repair Disk ) on an Iternal drive, an additional line appears in the ouput: "TRIM-ing unused blocks" (or similar). It is very satisfying.

I'm not talking about SSDs. Did I say SSD? No, I said "other USB based flash drives" (i.e. memory sticks, microSD cards installed in USB readers, etc. Like it or not, those are just smaller version of the same thing an SSD is, some a bit slower, but the technology is the same. There is absolutely no excuse for SSD manufacturers to expect their customers to abide by these asinine rules they decide to make up (like the ones you mentioned in your post). That's ridiculous man...

I've had that same problem with the crucial M4 SSDs. Not on my computers but on a friends I was setting up for him.

I use Intel SSDs and have never had to do that. I like the speed of the M4 but the first time my friend New PC wouldn't boot or see the SSD I thought I was Sunk, I Fried my friends SSD. But after several Reboots the drive showed up and started the PC. Then it happened again and then I started looking through the Crucial site and saw the problem.

Good Luck & Best Wishes.

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.

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One issue with TRIM is that doing the actual TRIM-ing takes the drive a while, as it has to do some un-requested re-writing of its superblocks. In SATA II, TRIM commands cannot be queued, so the drive has to keep an internal notation and TRIM when it gets idle. For SATA III, the TRIM command can be queued, so it can be executed Out-of-order, such as saved for a calm moment, then executed completely.