Crucial M500 just crashed!

My Crucial M500 960GB just failed.

Weird though because it just disappeared when I booted up. Then when I shut down, rebooted, it didn't appear in BIOS or in Windows. I disconnected it and hooked it up to my desktop and it said it needed to initialize the drive. I disconnected, reconnected to my laptop and did same thing. So I initialized it, formatted it, and seems to be fine. Now I'm putting my WHS 2011 and gigabit ethernet connection to the test for a restore! I think I will still RMA the drive though, and buy a Samsung 840 Evo instead, and sell the RMA drive. Makes me a bit uneasy. It's used primarily as a storage, scratch, gaming drive.

Edit: Hmmm. Should have tried this first: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-S...quot-disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215

Edit 2: Well everything restored, but now it won't keep it's assigned drive letter (D after a reboot. I have to manually assign the letter. I did read that zeroing out the drive worked for some people, but that means another restore (which took 1.5 hours)...

Edit 3: After a secure erase and another restore (450GB worth) all seems to be working fine now. Also updated the firmware before I did a restore, figured might as well, was MU02, latest MU05... I guess I'll hold on to this drive for a while and if it does it again, I'll RMA.

 

I think the firmware upgrade will be what did the 'trick'.

Why didn't you upgrade when it was originally available?

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...d-new-firmware-m500-ver-mu05.html#post9608562


Even when they don't mention " Numerous Bug fixes and stability improvements", they are still there in the newest versions.

 

Because newest is not always best. Why should someone upgrade when they are otherwise not having any problems?

Remember when the M500 (or maybe it was the M4) got a firmware update that had a bug where the drive would fail after it was powered on for X number of hours?

 

When it specifically states "Numerous Bug fixes and stability improvements" it is better.

Yeah; I agree to hold off on upgrading the second you read about new firmware, but 3 or 4 months?

 

I'll ask you again: Why should someone upgrade when they are otherwise not having any problems?

 

This is a failure to communicate.

Not on my end though...

 

So you don't have an answer. As expected. Have a wonderful day.

 

As saturnotaku mentioned, I don't upgrade firmware or BIOS "just because". I used to have to always be on top of everything, but over time I've learned "if ain't broke, don't fix it" is the safest mentality when you need continuous support and stability. More often than not a firmware upgrade or BIOS update have resulted in more time spent fussing than putting the machine to work.

 

You have a wonderful day as well! I too didn't expect you to see the obviousness of the need to upgrade to the latest firmware in this case. sigh.

I don't advocate to update, 'just because' either - but stability improvement promises are not to be taken lightly, imo.

Yeah, they have caused headaches for me too occasionally. But what I have learned is that it is safer to be on the latest version (after a certain amount of test time by myself or others) than to hope they will keep working indefinitely as the rest of the ecosphere changes around them anyways.


There is no 100% 'safe' path to follow - the best we can do is to (relatively) keep up until these (BIOS/Firmware/Update) issues are no more (well past my timeline).

 

My take is I am staying with Mu03, If the manufacturer would state exactly what these mysterious bug fixes.. are, it might change my mind. And since I purchased my system with the M500 I am not sure who I would need to return it to if it bricked ... GentecPC, Crucial, Sager ??
Interesting that some reported issues with 4K performance after this firmware "upgrade" to MU05

 

JOSEA,

you're going to be waiting a long time for that info. I don't know of any manufacturer that is that honest.

As for your concern of who to return the drive to - that is the last thing on my mind. As I have stated many times; if my data (or my clients data) has touched an SSD or a HDD - that drive is with me till death do us part (the drive's death; via a hammer, not mine...).