PNY Prevail Elite 120gb / Dell Inspiron 7720

Hi! I need some help. I bought a Dell 7720 in April. Later in April I bought a PNY Prevail Elite 120gb SSD. I've called Dell several hundred times and spoke to PNY tech support several hundred times and googled until the only links left to read were in a different language.

Running Win8 64, i7, 8 GB ram

The work area it usually rests is a wooden desk, in a carpeted room and a microfiber chair. It gets no natural light and the lamp in the room is LED.

Timeline:

May 6 - SSD failed, got warranty replacement
Jun 10 - SSD failed again, got warranty replacement
Jul 4 - SSD failed again, got a little more serious will Dell, spoke to 2 supervisors and umpteen underlings. Got the motherboard replaced on the 7720, got another SSD.
Sep 21 - SSD failed again.

I got it warranty replaced through PNY this time. It's still sitting on my desk unopened. When the SSD failed again on Sep 21, I went out and bought a small Seagate (non-SSD) to use as the OS drive. It's working fine still.

I don't believe I got 4 defective SSDs in a 5 month period. So, that would lead me to believe it's something in the laptop. Since I'm not a hardware technician and magical elves who fry hard drives don't exist, I need some help in figuring out cause. I don't want to deal with this anymore but I have a 5th SSD sitting here, unopened, begging to be put to use. Well, that and I paid for the damn thing way back in April.

I think it's the laptop, but what defect could cause SSDs to continually fry? It's the same bay every time. The non SSD has been running fine since September. That same bay ate 4 SSDs.

Please help me figure out who to blame.

 

it sounds to me its the way you use your computer that the SSD's firmware and controller doesn't like, and it sounds so much like a panic lock

Causes of "Panic Lock"?

your SSD is controlled by a sandforce controller and historically these controllers enter the "panic lock" mode much easier than any other controllers out there

try another SSD, from samsung, crucial, intel or plextor and stay away from small brands

intel uses a sandforce controller IIRC but its firmware is written much better than small brands, and issues will be addressed and solved much quicker because of the company having so much resources to allocate to solving disastrous issues

at the meantime if you are really dedicated to carry on using this unreliable drive, do all the things you can to prevent your computer from entering sleep mode and hibernation mode

you can do this the simplest way by going on your power options under the choose what closing the lid does tab tell the computer to either shutdown or do nothing for any actions

if you want to recover some harddrive space you can also go on cmd and type

"powercfg -h off" without the "", this would completely disable hibernation and delete hdd space allocated for hibernation, effectively recovering hdd space equal to your ram size

 

Very interesting! 2 of the failures came when it was coming out of hibernation, 2 of them while in the middle of playing Eden Eternal. Usually, one of the first things I do is disable sleep and hibernation, but this came with Win8 which is still causing me issues (not the OS's fault, more of an "I'm a dinosaur, I didn't want to upgrade kinda problem") so I don't think I ever changed very many settings. I will try one more time and disable sleep & hibernation. If it fails again, I will give it to someone else to use in a desktop and buy a new one. Any suggestions for one that doesn't lock up? It doesn't need to be large, I only use it for OS and programs, my files are on a 2nd drive.

 

don't give it to a good friend of yours, he'll hate you for life if it dies with a work related document at the very last minute