R2 + questionably branded mSATA drive = trouble?

I installed a 60GB Adata mSATA drive first thing when I got my machine. Things have worked beautifully for 2 weeks. Suddenly today, while I was just sitting in Windows, it restarted and went into a Windows repair loop. A .dll file had gone corrupt, was the most I could tell from the attempted repair logs. No amount of Windows repairs, MBR rebuilds or repairs, or system restores helped. In the end, I just opted to do a complete reinstall.

I have things running as they should again, but this unexplained problem has me pretty annoyed, and I can only assume it will happen again. As I have only bought well-respected SSD brands in the past, I am leaning towards blaming the Adata mSATA drive for this. Does this sound like the sort of problem that an unreliable SSD can cause? Could it somehow be the R2? The drivers (All factory at the moment)? I really hope I can get some ideas on how to prevent this in the future.

Thanks!

 

whats the model of the mSATA drive? Just curious

 

Sigh...waited all day for a response

It's the Adata XM13. On Amazon and Newegg - pretty good, unless of course it is the reason I had this problem.

 

Does it use a sand force controller? Just curious as I've heard of lots and lots of people having issues with sand force based drives.

Sent from my Galaxy S2 using Tapatalk 2

 

Actually yeah, and I was wondering if that's the cause.

I sent an email to Adata support, and they said theyve gotten very few complaints about the drive concerning errors and data corruption.

Are the R2's sata controllers ok?

Another detail: there's 2 screw holes in the msata drive, and only 1 hole in the r2. The other hole spot is actually a plastic peg. This peg is too big for the screw hole on my msata drive, so the drive doesn't set all the way down as it should. Do you think maybe this could cause a problem?

 

Another factor that may be useful:

Firefox got screwy before all this happened. The only thing that fixed it was reinstalling it entirely. Yesterday, the same thing happened with Firefox. This has me worried the big crash may be coming again soon.

Don't these all sound like hard drive data corruption problems? Not RAM, not GPU, maybe CPU?

 

so reinstall fixes it but then it goes whoos again after a day?

reboot, press f12 at bios and choose dell diagnostics.
let it run and test all hardware.

 

Thanks for looking into it. Just ran it, got no errors back.

Opened it up and looked at the peg/hole situation. The drive is not set perfectly in. My 2 options are to leave it screwed in a little loosely, or tighten it down with the 1 screw, thus putting a bit of strain on the PCB of the drive (If you didn't read above, the peg is too big for the hole in the SSD). Since I was in there, I decided to try a bit of extra tightness over the loose fit I had previously. I really think this might be the cause of the problems, since a loose fit would cause inconsistent problems. Thoughts?

 

It is possible that, if you are explaining that correctly, your drive is incorrectly seated. That will certainly cause issues.

Can you post some pics of the mSATA drive and these pegs you are speaking of? I know that the Sager laptops have a single peg with a screw to hold the drive in place and they work with no problems.

But if there are 2 pegs and one is not able to accommodate your mSATA drive hole, it may be the cause of the issues.

 

So, the peg does not fit through the hole. My 2 options are to screw it down so both sides are even, but it may be a little loose, or, tighten the screw a bit and put a bit of strain on the PCB.

 

you're sure that the msata card is seated properly?
try a macguyver solution with tape to see if you still have the problem without screws, might indeed be when you put a screw in the card doesn't connect properly.
if so looks like the casing has a minor fabrication defect with a misplaced screwhole.

 

No, the hole is in the exact right place. The peg is just too big for the hole on the SSD. This makes the SSD sit up at a 5 degree angle instead of lie completely flat once I screw it in.

 

aha, then it might be not connecting properly and cause some strange stuff...