A machine is running Windows 7 x64 with several other systems running on VMware Workstation. I built the machine myself, using only quality parts and ran memtest86+ several times without error. Everything worked perfectly for months.
Then I decided to change the main hard disk, because it was the only part that wasn't new when I built the computer. Since this hdd is only for the OS (there are other HDDs for data), I don't need much space and I wanted to try something new, so I bought a 120 GB solid state drive: OCZ-VERTEX2 3.5
Some time later, the system crashed for the first time. It froze and AFAIR the screen was showing gray stripes. Again, some time later, VMware crashed – same here, VMware has never crashed on any of my machines before. At some point, I wanted to check the drive status (long before the VMware crash, probably last year) of the SSD, so I ran HDD Health and it told me, the SSD's health is 86%. This hasn't changed until today. Since SSDs are supposed to be more stable, I'm wondering if that information is just unaccurate.
Here's my question:
Are those two crashes just unfortunate incidents, which cause some work, because I tend to reinstall crashed systems, or could there by any connection to the SSD? Is there a way to find that out (SSD stability test or something)?
- Asus M4A78 Pro
- 4x 4 GB = 16 GB RAM DDR2
- AMD Phenom 9650 Quad 2.3 GHz
Best Answer
The only way you could know for sure would be to run an equivalent test like memtest86 but for hard disks. I don't know if anything like this exists, because it would of course wipe all the data that is on the disk.
Reading corrupted data is a known problem with disks though - generally they're pretty reliable, but filesystems like ZFS include checks to make sure any read errors don't go undetected as they do happen.
Have you re-run memtest86 since the problem happened? Two crashes on their own are pretty ordinary, especially running non-trivial things like a VM under Windows. Hardware also does deteriorate over time, and it could have even been something as simple as a brownout that didn't cause your power supply to shut off - assuming you're not connected to a high quality UPS.
I'm also not sure what you mean by SSDs being more 'stable' - they are widely known to have a significantly shorter lifespan than hard disks - people choose them for speed, not reliability. Even Intel said at the last Linux Australia conference they wouldn't use SSDs for mission-critical data just yet (that was a very interesting talk, go watch the video if you weren't there!)