How To Scan SSD for Errors and Bad Vectors?

I have a 1tb samsung ssd that I upgraded last year from a 250gb samsung ssd. That old samsung ssd had maybe 30gb of space left. So I then cloned that ssd into the new 1tb nvme samsung ssd. So I been using this nvme samsung ssd for a while already about a year.


There is about 650gb of space remaining so thus still plenty of space.


This laptop is 5 years old or so.


Specs on this laptop are


Dell XPS 15 9550
i5-6300HQ
32gb ram - Upgraded from 8gb ram last year
1tb samsung nvme ssd - Upgraded from old 250gb ssd
84whr battery



Now I mentioned I played online poker and use certain programs like holdem manager 2 that is very intensive. But now i might have to use holdem manager 3 which I was told is extremely computer intensive. Thus imagine computer lagging a bit if your computer isn't fast enough. But i heard it lags even if you have a very fast computer.


Now few times when i was playing, the poker client lagged and crashed and had issues. This is for sure related to that holdem manager 3. Also, i read lot of people complain about it the program as some ppl say its not a finished product and not that good.


The thing is i was told if im having these issues, i need to submit a report when this lagging and crashing happens. Thus they would get a report and can take a look at my zip files to see the issue. I did this few times. They told me they didn't see me send any of these reports at all which confused me. They then told me ... it might be possible my hard drive is corrupted and has bad vectors and to fix that.

 

Now when i was using the older samsung ssd, there were a few times when i turned on my dell xps 15 9550 laptop, only for it to not turn on, took few times to turn on. Or... it got that message of it scanning the hard drive for errors and bad vectors. I remember it was that black dell screen where it keep scanning... but it never fully scans. So i have to power it off and power it on etc.


I know when I got the new 1tb samsung nvme ssd... i considered starting fresh and not cloning the ssd as there were issues with my older samsung ssd. Few times i have turned on my laptop and it didn't turn on but then eventually it powered on. I am not 100% sure if with this new samsung 1tb nvme ssd... if there was a time when i turn on laptop only for it to scan hard drive for errors and bad vectors. If it did... it happened maybe once.


My question is... is there a way to scan my hard drive for errors and bad vectors? And if so, is there a way to fix it? Obviously I don't want to format my 1tb samsung nvme ssd. But if i do that... then i won't have any issues then in the future?

 

Scanning of the drive usually occurs when you don't shutdown properly IIRC on older OS versions it would do a scan every 5-10 times you reboot or something along those lines. With W10 / W11 I don't see this happening.

With an NVME though if it's happening it should be fairly quick in processing the request to scan. Seeing as though you cloned and didn't do a fresh install it might be a remnant from the prior install causing the disk checks to occur. If you go with a wipe / install set the windows partition for 100GB and then after the install allocate the remainder to a new partition for storage.

 

Sorry for the obvious: have you extended the partition to the end after you cloned the smaller drive into the bigger one?

 

I'm staying out of this one.
Never seen an online poker game that was not a malware or virus embedded scam site.
I'd definitely take a serious long look at task manager while it was running.
There's a reason it's such a heavy resource load and I'd wager it's not poor coding or benign in any way.

 

So someone else on a forum mention to download samsung magician and it can check that.


I already have that software on my computer since that was the program i used to clone my old 250gb ssd into the new samsung 1tb nvme ssd. I only have one ssd in my laptop now.


So would i go on performance benchmark, then select the ssd drive... i only have one hard drive in my dell xps laptop... then scan?

 

Open This PC. Select the drive you want to scan with a left click, then right click and select Properties.

Click on the Tools tab, the click the button labeled "Check" and then click "Scan drive" and that will scan the drive for errors, including bad sectors.

I knew what you meant when you said "vectors" but the correct term is sectors.



If the drive scan finds errors, the utility will tell you and ask if you want to repair the errors.

 

Disable the fast startup in the power options. Some XPS laptops had an issue with booting to a black screen from time to time with that option enabled.

 

I clicked on check under tools and it said it didn't detect errors but says you can still check it. I did scan and it shows no errors were found.


Would that mean if i checked it with samsung magician, it would show the same thing? Issue is for some reason, after i updated samsung magician... i cannot even open the program anymore for some reason.

 

Download a basic ssd test tool - crystal disk info and run it. It will instantly show if your ssd is failing, wear level etc. Then download something like a seatools test and run a short test first. If it passes - run a long test on your ssd.

If Samsung magician does not open, uninstall it completely and then install the latest version.

 

A while back I used either samsung magician or samsung migration to clone my old ssd into the new ssd.


If i uninstall samsung magician, would i delete anything important? Such as like a history of when i did the clone from the old ssd to the new ssd?


Again i dont remember if i used samsung data migration or samsung magician a while back to do the cloning. The old ssd that i cloned from, i had completely formatted and wiped it. Does any of this matters?

 

I would say none of that matters.

You would not delete anything important if you uninstall Magician. I don’t think magician has the function to clone the ssd, it’s only for the firmware updates, over provisioning and couple more things. I just installed the latest version and confirmed it does not have the option to clone the SSD. Cloning must have been done via a different software.

 

Magician is only an app and has nothing to do with your data. Delete if you're not needing its functions. There are other apps you can use if you need to clone a drive in the future.