2nd Crucial M4 has died on me

I've had my laptop for about a year now. When I first bought it I picked up an aftermarket 128gb Crucial M4. That died on me after 6-7 months but at the time I was looking for a little bit more space so I wasn't too stressed about it. However my current 256gb has died on me after 5 months. I was under the impression they were a bit more reliable so maybe I'm just a bit unlucky. Anyone else have a short life on these? For now I went ahead and bought a Samsung 830 to replace it (which I hope will be reliable). I think I'm going to RMA the M4, although not sure what I'll do with it.

 

So, tell us what and how you use it.

(Including O/S, % filled, hours left idling, % unallocated, type of workload and % of time in those workloads).

It's easy to 'kill' an SSD: simply use it like a HDD.

 

Did you optimize it in the first place? There is about 15 steps you should take.

Also the most reliable ones are from Intel.

 

I've been using my SSDs like HDDs for years. I just don't go out of my way to benchmark or defrag it.

No need to optimize anything. A 1 year old notebook is fairly modern and will have Windows 7. In those conditions, an SSD should "just work."

 

I don't benchmark my SSDs ever and I do take the many of the steps to optimize them, although not sure I take every single optimization precaution (I've just looked at a handful of guides to optimize SSDs before using them.) I don't even do that much writing to them as I have a secondary drive for personal files. Pretty much just run the OS and occasionally install programs. I leave the computer on idling most of the time although not with any intensive programs running but still if I had it up 24/7 for 5 months (which I didn't but let's assume that I did) that's till under 4000 hours of usage for my second drive which isn't a very long life span.

 

Specific questions call for specific answers...

You failed to answer almost all of them...

Btw; 'optimizing' an SSD is simply a bad idea with Win7/8.

 

Sorry I was in a hurry so I gave a general answer earlier. I'll try and be a little bit more specific.

My OS is Windows 7 for both my dead SSDs. On the 128, the % I had filled was probably 80-85% due to a couple large games I had installed on it instead of my HDD, which I realize can be pretty rough on them. However the % filled on the 256 was probably around 30-35% since I definitely didn't install everything I had on the 128. I also do almost no uninstalling so what was not filled for the 256 should have been mostly unallocated.

As far as optimizing goes, it was mostly just disabling a few windows features like defrag and hibernation, setting the page file to a set number and setting up certain programs to run off my HDD, like redirecting chrome cache to a folder on HDD.

I would say up time would be 90% of the time, and idling for maybe 60% of that (I work during the day and typically have it in usage for 5 hours a day when I come home, though relatively recently I've remote desktoped into it during work from time to time). Usage is mostly would be surfing the internet and playing a few older games (like warcraft 3 from time to time) and/or not intensive games (recently I've played pokemon online a bit) and occasional some newer games like diablo 3 & swtor although I've generally didn't play those much on the 256 drive.

 

You are unlucky or your laptop has some issues with voltage .. or u doing something with SSDs what u shouldn't ..
Gather all dodgy softs what u using and try find fault in laptop model side or actual SSDs handling in windows..

I have 2x m4 128G and never had problems.. not using any stupid test onand on and on again just usingas usual user .. with normal programs ..

 

Thanks for the additional details.

With what you're reporting both drives shouldn't have died. Although 'unallocated' and 'free space' is not equivalent for an SSD's spare are and GC routines, your use hardly constitutes an 'overuse' of the storage subsystem.

I would be inclined to think it is any specific software and/or tweaks that you've applied (avoid them like the plague).

Or, as GalaxySII suggests; a hardware/physical/electrical issue or even a combination of both.

Does your machine get too hot (specifically the SSD compartment)? Is everything seated correctly (RAM, SSD, wifi cards, keyboard, etc.)?

This is a puzzler. Good luck with your next SSD and tracking down the root of this problem.

I would say that this is not the M4's fault (directly) - there are other issues at play here.

(when a system is 'haunted' like your is - it is time for a replacement, not an exorcism).

Good luck.

 

omg now every time I see (tilleroftheearth) recommending an M4 -> I'm going to be posting this thread ... about 613,223,452,203 times so far

anyways, sorry OP for the bad luck. If you can, RMA the second drive. And welcome to the Samsung problem free land Besides making sure your partitions are aligned (only XP slight inconvenience), use your new SSD like you want without having to do any special optimizations and what not. Samsung Magician has everything you need, nice and easy, the way it should be.

 

+1, Samsung means trouble free and efficient SSD.

 

I'm sure everything is seated correctly and the machine only gets hot when the fans get clogged with dust on the bottom intake area but when that happens, typically the GPU fails on me before anything else serious happens and I promptly clean them out. Checking the temps with HWMonitor when this happens, it doesn't go above mid 80s Celsius. Not really sure what else is wrong, I'm somewhat sure there's nothing too wrong with the voltages but if this happens to me one more time I'll be sure that my system is just off somehow and replace it.

 

I say bad luck. Been running three M4's pretty heavily over the last 6-8 months with zero issues.

Samsungs are good too but no guarantee they won't fail either.

Hope you don't have any other tragedy's however.

No special precautions required with an SSD. And filling it up with games is not going to "hurt" it at all. It's constant (and I mean daily) writes, erases, and re-writes, filling the drive that will reduce the usable life of the drive.

I'm assuming that 80C is referring to CPU or GPU and not the SSD?

 

I realize there's no guarantee with the Samsung either but I figured I'd switch it up anyways since my luck seems to be thin with the M4. And yes, 80C is for GPU/CPU and that's only when the intake fan is really really clogged, although my gpu can fail on me when it's in the 70s.

 

If the gpu/cpu is 80C then most likely in a notebook: everything else is at 80C...

Most specs I've seen for SSD's rate them at 70C max - this could very well be the reason you're killing your drives.

As for the Samsung option? I've never been impressed (in the past, granted) with their real world performance and with what I've read to now; I may never be:

Anand Lal Shimpi:

Above quotes for the Intel S3700 review:

See:
AnandTech - The Intel SSD DC S3700 (200GB) Review