Secondary SSD (SanDisk i100 32GB) disappearing for long periods of time

I bought an ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VD a year and a half ago. This notebook comes with a BGA SSD that's integrated into the motherboard, originally meant for caching the slow 5400RPM primary HDD. About half a year after I purchased the notebook, I upgraded the HDD to an SSD, and because I no longer needed the small SSD for caching, I reformatted it to NTFS and used it as a secondary storage device. It just so happens that the entirety of my libraries (Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos) did not use up 32GB of space, so I changed the location of each of these libraries to a directory in the i100. Recently, however, the drive has been disappearing randomly, and when it disappears, it can't be detected in the OS nor the BIOS. When it first happened I thought the drive had failed, but it reappeared after a few hours. Anyone have a reason for this? I have attached the SSDLife assessment of the drive as well as the SMART readings that it gives, they might help. My guess would be that it's in the process of failing, but I haven't ever encountered this so I'm not sure.



Thanks in advance!

 

With all your data on it, it doesn't matter what any utility says. Dump it.

One day, it will disappear and you'll be here asking how to recover the files and we'll be no help at all.


Good luck.

 

Right, yeah, I forgot to mention that I cloned the partition to a partition on my primary SSD (so as to not screw up the directory paths) and the data's on Google Drive as well. I take it that means it's in the process of dying?

 

You could try this and see if things improve: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...recognized-bios-after-format.html#post9583458

But yeah, such a small capacity is bound to wear out sooner or a little later.

If it doesn't help then disable or remove it as suggested earlier. And, if better, make sure to backup often still.

 

Usually SSD's fail with the controller just going dead. I doubt it was wear of the cells, because that would just result in progressively slower writes. It sounds like a power issue to me, and probably nothing you can do about it if it's soldered on the mainboard. Otherwise tilleroftheearth's advise is sound. Either disable it completely and don't use it, or just replace the system.