SSD appears to become disconnected from computer randomly each day

Question

The SSD is a Samsung 840 EVO 120GB drive.

I've been dealing with an issue for at least the past month where around once a day my computer will completely freeze. The first go around, I was pretty skeptical, as there wasn't anything in the event viewer (now I know why), but I thought nothing of it until it happened again. This time, upon rebooting, I ended up booting from one of my other hard drives with another OS on it.

I looked at my boot order and noticed that my Windows SSD was no longer listed. I tried reseating both the SATA and power cable connecting to the drive, but had no luck, to which I reseated the SATA cable connecting to the motherboard. This ended up working.

I had actually recently took my computer on an extended road trip (not removing the hard drives like I should have) so I figured that it was possible that one of the cables had become lose, so again, I thought nothing of it.

Until it happened again, and again, and again. At this point, it seems to be happening every day to every other day. The system is not being moved at all, and I'm 99 percent positive there is 0 reason for the cables to become disconnected, however, the only fix to the problem is to reseat the cables each time. Could this be a faulty SATA/power cable, or is there something wrong with the SSD itself and needs to be replaced?

Answer 1

If you can manage to get it to boot, when you are in there. You should check the S.M.A.R.T information of your hard drive. There are programs out there that can retrieve this information. However it is always wise to get the tool from the manufacturer's website. Here is the link to the webpage to get the Samsung Magician, it does more than get the smart information.

Samsung Magician

The other thing you should try is opening command prompt with admin privileges / elevated privileges. And put in there CHKDSK /r This will locate any bad sectors and attempt to retrieve any information salvagable as well as check for other errors and attempts to fix them. Doing both these things will help eliminate if there is something wrong with your Hard Drive.

If both these check out, it is more than likely a problem with your cable or connectors.

Also to add, you can perform both of these checks if the Hard drive is the secondary hard drive as well however you will need to modify your chkdsk command to the following CHKDSK (volume letter with :) /r