Part of SSD Corrupted? Still OK to Use?

Hi Windows 10 Forum,

I don't know if I'm in the right place, but I have a laptop with a M.2 SSD I bought and I have been troubleshooting it for a few weeks to find out a problem. Now, I have narrowed it down to a small 510MB part of my drive that seems to be completely void from being able to be written. I created partitions around the suspected area and found the problem. I used a program to write to every part of the drive successfully with just this one section being corrupted. When Windows or another program tries writing to anything in this area, including creating a partition, the computer just hangs and stops working. In the past, when I installed Windows 10 (the original OS of my system) at 0GB, the install would finish around 20GB storage and my OS would just completely crash. Now, I installed Windows 7 at 20GB since I found out the corrupted area seems to be at 15.1 to 15.6GB. Now, it seems to be working fine.

The drive still passes SMART in flying colors with no indications of bad blocks.

Knowing that this area is corrupted and is not read/write-able, is it still safe for me to use this drive? I don't have the budget to purchase a new drive in the new future and may be using it until December of this year on a daily basis for school work.

Thank you,
Matthew


SMARTOutput.txt

cereberus said:

I would not trust that drive long term - certainly not to December. If you cannot afford an SSD, buy a new cheap conventional HDD - it may be slower but will unless unlucky, last a reasonable lifespan. Whatever you do, backing up critical data is essential. Cloud is good for stuff like word/execl files.

The drive is a M.2 SSD, so I can't use a conventional hard drive even though I would love to buy one. The computer only has a M.2 slot, which makes replacements expensive.

CountMike said:

If you are talking about that 512MB part, it's most likely it's reserved by SSD for it's needs as a "spare" for garbage collecting and "Wear leveling "
Wear leveling - Wikipedia
Demystifying SSD Wear Leveling | Network Computing
My is last one and much larger:

I created that partition myself because I was able to narrow down the cause of the corruption to that specific area of my SSD. I was able to write successfully to all other sectors with garbage dummy files except for sectors around that partition, where my entire OS crashed when it reached that area.

cereberus said:

I would not trust that drive long term - certainly not to December. If you cannot afford an SSD, buy a new cheap conventional HDD - it may be slower but will unless unlucky, last a reasonable lifespan. Whatever you do, backing up critical data is essential. Cloud is good for stuff like word/execl files.

I would love to buy one, but the computer only has a single M.2 SSD slot. I'm currently working with my flash drive (main mode of storage) and Google Drive. I am concerned about my data. Thank you for that time estimate.

dalchina said:

Hi, that sounds a perilous state.

For a report, try Hard Disk Sentinel (trial) - reports on SSD's too.
Can also do some tests.


If that's the only drive you have, you must make sure you have backups. You do not want to lose time-critical work.

We also strongly advise the routine use of disk imaging e.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + external storage for image sets. Thus you can recover quickly and without technical help when things go wrong, even to a new disk should yours fail.

You might want to consider the time cost of troubleshooting a failing small drive vs finding a way to replace it.

I prefer to use open source tools and using up trials isn't exactly what I'd like to do on my computer. I'm pretty sure that this area is corrupted already, and I've already used some other tools to verify other parts of my drive to make sure they are read/writable. I'm just very concerned the corrupted area may spread and I may be left with an unbootable computer during a class or time when I do need it.


This is a result after all open space except that partition has been written to with garbage data to ensure read/write abilities.

The Crystal disk has 2 tests, one for SMART and one for benchmarks. It does not have the full battery of tests for testing drives.
HD Sentinel, and HD Tune each can perform the 3 common methods for testing drives. They each have a full error scan or full surface scan.
There is one more method that can be used to test drives and that is administrative command prompt chkdsk /f

The system specs in the My Computer section did not display the notebook manufacturer. If it is Dell or HP they have their own drive testing software/firmware.

dalchina said:

Hard Disk Sentinel is an excellent tool and you can uninstall it after you've used it.

Feel free to use a free program - Macrorit diskscanner...HD Tune...

This computer is sometimes being put to commercial/business use, so many of these free programs are not allowed for use. As per Macroit under its description of Commercial Usage under the Free License section - and HD Tune's note of Free for Personal Use.

zbook said:

The Crystal disk has 2 tests, one for SMART and one for benchmarks. It does not have the full battery of tests for testing drives.
HD Sentinel, and HD Tune each can perform the 3 common methods for testing drives. They each have a full error scan or full surface scan.
There is one more method that can be used to test drives and that is administrative command prompt chkdsk /f

The system specs in the My Computer section did not display the notebook manufacturer. If it is Dell or HP they have their own drive testing software/firmware.

The manufacturer is Lenovo. I tried chkdsk.exe /f and it came up with no faults. However, when I created a partition, Windows stopped working and I tried to recreate the partition in GParted. The entire drive now fails to boot and Windows just doesn't start. I think this drive is toast. Thank goodness this PC has a 32GB interal storage unit, but it would have been great to have that 128GB drive. I'm going to plead with the seller for a replacement. Thank you for your help.