c300 (firmware 002) fails to execute SMART self test, stops responding.

[#1]

I am seeing a weird SMART problem with my drive. When I run the SMART self test on the drive in both Windows and Linux, the drive fails to respond until the computer is cycled off/on (reset is not good enough). Has anyone else experienced this or have any ideas? 

Full details:

I have the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB in a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 running Windows 7 64-bit using AHCI mode. When I run the Lenovo diagnostics (PC Doctor)  inside of Windows 7, during the SMART tests the machine BSODs with stop code 0x000000F4, and then reboots.  Upon rebooting, my computer's bios reports a hard drive initialization error. If I power off and power back on, the computer detects the drive with no problem and boots regularly. 

I ran a Lenovo provided PC Doctor DOS boot-cd, and ran the full set of harddrive tests. It didn't include any tests that involved SMART. The drive passed all tests. Similarly, I've run a chckdisk, and the drive has no errors.

I've booted off of an Ubuntu LiveCD to try and further diagnose the problem and see if it was limited to Windows. Using smartctl --all /dev/sda, I viewed the dump of the SMART info stored on the drive. The drive reports no self tests have ever been logged (even though I have definitely run selftest). If I run the selftest in linux by doing smartctl -t short /dev/sda, I get an error from smartctl saying executing the selftest command failed (after about 2 minutes). At this point, I can no longer access the SSD from linux, and things like sudo head /dev/sda fail with input/output error. When I reboot, the drive is still in it's failed state, and again my bios will not initialize it. Powering off and on and it works like a charm. I tried this test in linux under both AHCI and IDE modes and had the same result. 

Any help will be grateful appreciated. 

[#2]

As far as I'm aware (though I don't have a C300 so this could have changed) no SMART apps currently support it. Though I would have expected them to return incorrect data rather than crash!

[#3]

I am not sure what info you are after with a SMART test, but I do know many apps do not correctly read SSD's yet.

You can use this tool though and get general SMART data from the C300's and other SSDs

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

It runs and reads out the SMART Data but shows 100/100/0 for all values, but it does show the correct "Power on Count" and "Power on Hours"

The latest Everest Ultimate reads out SMART Data from the C300's as well, and it appears to have some of the same info as the above app and it matches up and sounds correct as well.

[#4]

I am not actually after any type of SMART info The reason I ran into this and then investigated it further was that the Lenovo branded PC Doctor that comes installed with the laptop periodically runs background tests (including apparently SMART self-test) while Windows is running.  This was causing me to come home to the computer rebooted to a black screen saying hard drive initialization failed, which is kind of scary. I wanted to make sure my drive is OK.

Right, I'm able to read the SMART values out in CrysdalDiskInfo on Windows and with smartctl in Linux just fine. The CrystalDiskInfo values seem worthless since they're just default values it looks like. 

Regardless of the value of the SMART data, what concerns me is the drive completely freezes after being asked to do a SELF-TEST. I feel like that shouldn't happen. Does it mean something is wrong with the drive, maybe it's not implemented correctly by crucial, or maybe some incompatibility between my laptop and the drive? I'm running with a core i5 and using intel's own disk controller, so I imagine it's a pretty common configuration.  

Can anyone else see if they're able to successfully run a self-test? (NOTE: Drive is fine after power cycle for the worried). There's a windows version of smartctl you can use to issue the drive the command. It's available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/ I'm sure there are other tools that will tell the drive to self-test in windows

[#5]

I'd never even heard of a smart self test until this thread lol.

[#6]

See my reply to your post here

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Error-2100-HDD0-Hard-disk-drive-initialization-er...

I think you really should disable this feature/test, or uninstall the program.   If you do not want to disable/uninstall it, you should at least disable it from startup, that way it only runs when you manually open it so it is not writing to your disk all the time which would be bad.

Everest Ultimate shows proper values, so you might want to grab a trial of that.   That program was made to test and read/write to mechanical drives, so that is why it is failing and causing you issues.

[#7]

Here's an interesting wiki on smart technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring%2C_Analysis_and_Reporting_Technology

CrystalDiskInfo states that my 128GB C300 does have smart technology.  I suspect they all do.  Since the C300's supposedly have smart technology, I would expect them to pass any smart program inquiries.

I looked through the smart attribute list and there appear to be several items based on spin rate.  Obviously spin rate is zero for a SSD.  It appears that the smart standard (at least the standard version in the wiki) does not seem to be aware of SSD's.

Since this seems to be something your notebook is doing automatically, Crucial might want to take a look and sort this out a bit better.  If they don't find a way to fix it now, it will just keep happening to people forever. 

I'd get in touch with Crucial's Tech Support and see what they say.

-jb

[#8]

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_jb wrote:

CrystalDiskInfo states that my 128GB C300 does have smart technology.  I suspect they all do.  Since the C300's supposedly have smart technology, I would expect them to pass any smart program inquiries.

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As it says in the bottom paragraph of 'smart information' though - smart self test is optional.  A drive can support smart attributes and not self testing.  Though I would imagine it's not meant to crash!  I tried the Windows app above on my M225 SSD and the app said something about it being unsupported on my drive.

[#9]

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targetbsp wrote:

As it says in the bottom paragraph of 'smart information' though - smart self test is optional.  A drive can support smart attributes and not self testing.  Though I would imagine it's not meant to crash!  I tried the Windows app above on my M225 SSD and the app said something about it being unsupported on my drive.

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I originally thought this was something that ran automatically on hstun's computer...  after re-reading his initial post, I see that it is something that he is opting to run...  so, the answer for hstun is to stop running it... 

I think Crucial still might want to take a look at this problem, though.  It's starting to sound like the smart test itself has a flaw in it...  or that the smart technology isn't really ready for solid state drives.  IAE, Crucial should at least have an answer for people that run the smart test...

-jb

[#10]

I dunno...  I've been on this forum a year and like I say I'd never even heard of a smart test.  If this is the first time anyone has tried to run one on an SSD in a year I wouldn't rank it as a very high priority...  If the firmware writers don't have enough to do I'd work on an AHCI compatible flashing app myself.

Have you tried that app btw?  The command line for it is horrific.  I can't see many people favouring it over chkdsk.  I'd imagine its been ported from linux without the command line parameters being updated to a dos format.

From googles it looks like the intel drive don't work either so I guess it's an SSD thing.