INTEL ssd 520 series 480gb runs for 3 minutes then stops

[InTheMix]

Hello, I have an Intel SSD 520 Series 480GB hard drive on my windows desktop PC.  This hard drive has my window 10 S/W on it.  The PC will start, I can open an application.  After about 3 minutes, everything freezes.  I can begin the windows repair tools, but after 3 minutes it just freezes.  I took the hard drive out of my desktop pc, hooked an SSD cable and power to it with a USB on the other end of the cable and plugged into my laptop.  My laptop does recognize the drive, even lists the different folders on the drive.  I can go as far as opening any folder on that drive, that is when it freezes.  There is a file in the download file of the drive that I would like to copy to another drive, but, as soon as I get to and open the download folder, the drive just freezes.  If anyone knows of a work-around, I would appreciate any suggestions or ideas.  Have a great night.

Regards,

Scott

[SolidigmGleb]

Dear Scott,

Thank you for reaching out and sharing the details of your issue with the Intel® SSD 520 Series.

From your description, it sounds like the drive may be experiencing read errors or degraded NAND blocks that are causing system freezes when certain data sectors are accessed. Since the SSD is still partially readable, we recommend the following steps:

1. Try accessing the drive in Safe Mode or using a Linux live USB (such as Ubuntu Live). Sometimes, a lighter OS environment allows more stable access to failing drives for short periods.

2. Copy only the most important files first, starting with smaller ones, to avoid triggering the freeze.

3. If the drive continues to hang, you may use specialized recovery tools such as ddrescue (Linux) or R-Studio (Windows) that can skip unreadable sectors.

4. Avoid further writes or repair attempts to the drive to prevent additional data loss.

If the data is critical, you may want to contact a professional data recovery service experienced with SSDs — they have advanced tools to safely extract data from partially responsive drives.

I hope this helps you recover your important data. Please let us know if you have any updates or further questions.

Best regards,
Gleb
Solidigm Customer Support