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by frik 3770 days ago
> I've had about 3 850 EVOs go bad on me, just completely lock up the machine they are connected to, can't even run diag

That's worrying. It should at least stay a proper PCI-E citizen, not lock up the computer. And it should always provide the SMART data, even if the SSD is dead otherwise. And even if writing isn't possible anymore (safely, due to many bad bits), it should lock-down to read-only.

2 comments

I was using OCZ Vertex 2 SSD in the past, when (possibly due to a firmware bug) it just wouldn't appear on the SATA bus anymore and had an error LED lit up. I RMA-d the drive, and they said they have to reflash the firmware, but doing so would also loose all data because it would erase the AES key. (I never configured any encryption on the drive, but apparently it does use it by default).

Needless to say I didn't buy OCZ again, but I'm not sure if this is a general problem with SSDs or just Sandforce controllers.

I think this was just an OCZ thing.
Where I work we have had more OCZ drives fail on us than not.

I wouldn't trust then even with temporary data, no matter what performance they can push.

I think the EVO 850 are all SATA, not PCIe. But in general, yes, they should at least appear on the bus...

Interestingly, when this happenned to me, with some "ADATA" SSDs they would still negotiate a link speed, so their PHYs did get initialized. But Linux didn't get any further information from the disks, device type, name capacity... So maybe their firmware crashed halfway through initializing the SSD.