Newer S Series - SSD failed

I'm thinking I was probably foolish (having now seen the inner workings) but I purchased one of the new S series laptops in April and a couple of weeks ago it began complaining on bootup or resume about one of the drives failing. Then you'd boot into Windows, the intel utility would likewise complain and then it would return to "green" after validating it. The problem came back of course after the next resume. Now both have failed and it's not booting at all. I chose to break the raid and now the drives look like they're ready be recovered.

I called Sony this morning and they're going to ship me new drives, but I don't have a lot of confidence that it's not the controller. Seems random both drives would fail. I've also got a weird problem now where the internal battery keeps having to be pulled out and put back in. Otherwise after a resume attempt it'll start flashing orange on the battery indicator. Once you've reset it, it works again. The last time I got into windows it said "plugged in but not charging". So more bad news.

I hope that's somehow a derivative of a failing OS due to corruption but that doesn't explain the flashing when you're only in the Intel RAID menu. So I'm not optimistic there's not more problems. I hope it's not a lemon. I stupidly bought this because I wanted max features/performance/reliability and felt like the premium would ensure it. Obviously not the case.

If anyone's been down this road and has any suggestions, please let me know. I'm leaving on a trip in a couple of weeks and this laptop was budgeted just for it. It's going to suck if I can't get it running reliably again in the next two weeks. I'll lose 3-5 days this week waiting on the new drives alone.

Can I just purchase a regular drive that will offer "similar" performance and get that running instead? I've never had a laptop drive go bad before (without a clear accident that caused it) so I'm suddenly not sure about these flimsy SSD's.

-Nick

 

SSD can go bad. I had a Samsung SSD fail in a VAIO UX that I no longer own. I just had a couple of Crucial C300 drives in my VAIO Z1 and on of them sometimes wouldn't show up after a warm reboot. SSD is not perfect but it is a heck of a lot better than HDD.

Maybe you just got two drives in a bad run, hopefully the replacements fix you up.

I don't think you can replace the SSD RAID in the new S easily, if it is anything like the Z1 it is an expensive proposition. I just put two Intel X18 drives in my Z1, but in order to do it I had to strip the casings and void the warranty on the drives.

 

the same two sided ssd board and proprietary connector system used in the z...unlikely you can replace with aftermarket