Anyone ever see a boot SATA SSD disappear?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
5,792
113
This is certainly one of the stranger things I have ever seen on a FreeNAS machine. I have a home FreeNAS box that simply has 2x 8TB hard drives, two SATA SSDs a m.2 SSD and an Intel 710 SATA SSD for boot. This is on an Intel Xeon D-1518 system. Nothing fancy, just a backup box.

Temp monitoring had no issues. SMART shows no issues. The boot drive simply dropped and took a power cycle to re-appear.

Has anyone seen this?
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
515
113
Canada
Probably not your issue, but I once had a boot disk intermittently go dark on an IP-PBX. A power cycle brought it back to life, could last an hour or all day then with no warning, gone again. After some messing about, taking it out and checking it for damage, sticking it in an enclosure for a week and running bad blocks etc, the disk proved to be OK. I eventually realised that there was just not quite enough airflow below it and the controller on the disk was getting too warm, the smart value for the disk only showed a couple of degrees of temp rise when running badblocks, so I didn't think anymore about it at the time. IRC it was a Fujitsu disk. Anyway, I stuck a couple of washers between it and the case where it was mounted and the problem never returned :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Patrick

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
4,220
1,540
113
34
Germany
Yes, my old gaming pc with an intel 335 240gb ssd.
The boot drive simply dropped and took a power cycle to re-appear.
This is the same behavior I had with my ssd. At some point it took 2 or more power cycles to bring it back and one day it never came back :(
Intel ssd toolbox showed 99% lifetime, smart was okay, temperatures were okay, chkdsk showed 0 errors/bad blocks.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Patrick

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
Yes, my old gaming pc with an intel 335 240gb ssd.

This is the same behavior I had with my ssd. At some point it took 2 or more power cycles to bring it back and one day it never came back :(
Intel ssd toolbox showed 99% lifetime, smart was okay, temperatures were okay, chkdsk showed 0 errors/bad blocks.
Same issue currently on my parents PC with a Crucial SSD. It's occurred about 2 times this year, rebooting once or twice brings it back. I've replaced SATA cable and ports, and thought it was fixed but it occurred again recently. All SSD tests show the drive is fine and this time was about 8 or so months before it did it again.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Patrick

sfbayzfs

Active Member
May 6, 2015
259
143
43
SF Bay area
Same issue currently on my parents PC with a Crucial SSD. It's occurred about 2 times this year, rebooting once or twice brings it back. I've replaced SATA cable and ports, and thought it was fixed but it occurred again recently. All SSD tests show the drive is fine and this time was about 8 or so months before it did it again.
A few years ago I had a similar problem with a Crucial M4 in a desktop, and again with an M4 in a Mac Pro at work - both turned out to be the ~11K hours bug in a popular version of the M4 firmware which made it take forever to garbage collect in the background, and go offline. The drives would boot OK, and then drop after a while. Powering the drive on with the SATA cable disconnected for about an hour allowed it to garbage collect enough to be stable enough to run the firmware update, and it was fine after that.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
A few years ago I had a similar problem with a Crucial M4 in a desktop, and again with an M4 in a Mac Pro at work - both turned out to be the ~11K hours bug in a popular version of the M4 firmware which made it take forever to garbage collect in the background, and go offline. The drives would boot OK, and then drop after a while. Powering the drive on with the SATA cable disconnected for about an hour allowed it to garbage collect enough to be stable enough to run the firmware update, and it was fine after that.
Very interesting! I wonder if that's what it is... I'm not 100% it's an M4 but very likely.
This could explain why it also occurs on their desktop every few months.