I've been using a Intel Series 510 250GB SSD since March 2011 (so it's been about 15+ months). (My system's specs below.) Everything has been great, until all of a sudden this past Friday, the drive crashed--I was surfing and the PC went BSOD.
Windows repair (booting from install media) reports the only partition on the drive as "RAW"; likewise Partition Wizard Live CD. As far as I could tell, the data is unrecoverable. The Intel customer service officer on the phone (she was quite helpful) advised that I should do a secure erase and run a full diagnostic scan using the Intel SSD Toolbox, so as to properly evaluate if I should send it back to Intel.
Thankfully, I was able to dust off the WD Velociraptor that used to be the system disk to get the PC up and running. After some trial and error, I was also able to secure erase the SSD. But a full diagnostic scan reported no errors. I have since restored my Windows installation to the SSD. Again, full diagnostic scans revealed no problems with the SSD.
My questions:
1. Has anyone ever experience this before--sudden failure with BSOD, leading to utterly destroyed partition information or partition showing as "RAW" on the SSD? And yet after secure erase, showing no issues in full diagnostic scan?
2. What could have caused the problem? (Things that I should look into.)
3. Should I try to return the SSD nonetheless?
Any pointers would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance!
My system: Intel i7 930 (stock speed), Gigabyte X58A-UD3R / 12GB RAM (half Corsair, half Team) PC3-10700H at 1600Mhz / Gigabyte GTX 680 / Corsair HX620 PSU / HDD: 2x1TB, 1x2TB, 1x160GB, 1x320GBx1 / 2xDVDRW / Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
