BSOD during Short Self-Test, SSD then no longer detected.

[lcrelier]

Hey, I've recently bought HDS but I've been having problems with running the Short Self-Test on my Force MP600 SSD.

I have 3 drives, 2 Ironwolf HDDs and the Force NMVe SSD. The HDDs pass the Short Self-Tests without issue, but whenever I've tried running it on the SSD, it won't complete and give me a BSOD - each time giving me a different error.

The first time it was "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED". Next it was "UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION". Whenever the machine tries to reboot after, the drive is no longer detected and I'm faced with:

>>Checking Media Presence......
>>Media Present......
>>Start PXE over IPv4

Even if I boot into the BIOS I can no longer see the SSD. It's only after a full shutdown and wait that the drive is detected again and I can boot properly.

Despite these crashes, there's been no errors or reports to the drive in HDS. Other than the increasing number of "Unsafe Shutdowns" in SMART (as a result of those tests), the SSD health remains at 99% and has no media and data integrity errors.

When using the drive on my day to day I don't experience crashes or slowdowns. What exactly is happening here? Is my drive dying without symptoms, or is this isolated to the Self-Test?

[hdsentinel]

I can confirm that generally the SSD should have no problems at all, its 99% Health (probably 1% decrease related to wearout) confirms that it is working correctly.

Probably your MP600 has a firmware bug: when the special function (the internal hardware self test) started, the SSD "stuck" and no longer responds to the OS. This is why you saw the BSOD (like if we'd pull the drive from the working system) and also the BIOS does not recognise until a complete power cycle.

In 2021, somebody reported similar with the Force MP600. After investigating the situation, we found that some older MP600 models suffer from this issue: newer SSDs (serial number started with 21...) works correctly, but previous MP600 SSDs may have this firmware bug.

Not sure, but probably your MP600 also has this issue. While may be annoying, it does not affect the operation / performance of the SSD in general, so no need to worry about it, especially if the Disk menu -> Surface test -> Read test does not show yellow/red blocks.

As always, if you use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, it is possible to check your particular model and check/compare with the problematic (older) models tested.

[lcrelier]

Super, thanks a lot for the quick response.

Very interesting that this actually happened with some previous MP600s - I was thinking of maybe updating the firmware but afraid of it bricking the drive for good. Since it's working fine (and read tests don't show any problems either), then I'll leave it as is and just do read tests every now and then to make sure it remains good.

[SecCon]

While no experience with that particular drive, updating firmware for SSD, and NVME's for that matter, should not be avoided, if that is offered by the manufacturer. I think I have updated firmware 3-4 times on several of my, mostly, Samsung and Intel solid state driver over time.

Sure, the benefits are not always obvious, but in general newer firmwares are released to enhance security and performance.