Kingston SSD Problem?

Switched on my pc this morning and after about ten minutes it shut down whilst I was reading the BBC news. On restarting it offered me Safe Mode which I accepted and once established I restarted into Win 7 Pro 64-bit.

My pc's C: drive is a Kingston HyperX Savage 240 GB and my data is on D: a 1TB drive and I also have E: which is another 1TB drive. Using a batch file I back up my data on D: to E: as I feel fit. Outlook stores Data on C: and when I run the batch file the Outlook data is also copied to D: & E: (Initially I tried setting up Outlook to store its data on D:, but this proved unreliable.

So guessing that I may have a problem on the SSD C: drive, I have run Kingston's SSD Manager and all appears Ok?

The Kingston SSD is 4.5 years old which replaced my previous Sandisk which was about 3 years old when it failed.

Since this morning I have set the CMOS to Power Reduction and all OK since - about 6/7 hours.

Odd or what?

Cheers!

These things happen, often due to brownouts. The safe mode restart would have been the result of not shutting down properly. As the software says all is OK I wouldn't worry about it too much if it's just the single occurrence.

Ooops! I missed out of my OP that it did the same again about 20 minutes later.

One thing I will do is to open the pc up and give it a good clean out. It must be a few months since I last did that. I know that a few months back during long virtual meetings, the fan noise would get louder and louder. It has been much quieter recently - I hope that the fans are at least spinning! Although I did replace one at that time.

Cheers!

At first glance there's nothing obvious to suggest the drive. No prompt to run chkdsk, or reporting of bad sectors? Safe mode itself is just a bad shutdown option.

Sound more like a power / temperature thing. I'd be suspecting CPU temp / throttling, CPU fan speed, case ventilation first (since you're already going through the motions of giving it a clean).

Power reduction working suggests the PSU though.

Do you have any means of checking your mains supply? If this was around the time of the recent storm that might explain it. Of course, there are a host of things that could cause this, as Cammie says.

I have decent digital metres, plus a lab grade one, but even if connected a glitch would likely not show. My VDSL modem router and my VoIP ATA are on the same ring circuit as this pc and neither show any disruptions in recent times. No flickering lights either.

Weather today was cold and more or less dry. No thunderstorms for some time.

Cheers!

The power reduction was of my doing after the second shutdown. Currently am not doing anything which needs speed.

My best guess is that it is temperature related.

May have a better guess once I have the case opened up etc.

Its a pity that I don't have a utility which would show temperatures and fan speeds etc. If I go into the CMOS I can see those, but not accesible once booted.

Besides the details I posted earlier my pc has an AMD FX-8 FX-8 Eight Core 8320 Processor, together with an Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 Motherboard (AMD 790 Chipset), with 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz Memory.

Strangely about a month ago I kept getting MS Word crashing out, especially if I had MS Outlook running at the same time.

Cheers!

Try CPUID's HW Monitor. It's as good as you'll get for monitoring voltages, temps and fan speeds. It only reports what Windows thinks is going on though. The BIOS is the best option for getting an accurate reading, but as you say, not ideal.

https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

In reply to a post by Ancient_Mariner:

My best guess is that it is temperature related.

From what you describe that would be the prime suspect, for me at least.

In reply to a post by Ancient_Mariner:

Its a pity that I don't have a utility which would show temperatures and fan speeds etc. If I go into the CMOS I can see those, but not accesible once booted.

Loads of free one around though.

HWMonitor. I run Win7 and use v1.28

https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html#versi...

To check SSD status, CrytalDiskInfo

I use v7.5.1

https://osdn.net/projects/crystaldiskinfo/downloads/...

In reply to a post by Ancient_Mariner:

Besides the details I posted earlier my pc has an AMD FX-8 FX-8 Eight Core 8320 Processor, together with an Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 Motherboard (AMD 790 Chipset), with 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz Memory.

Strangely about a month ago I kept getting MS Word crashing out, especially if I had MS Outlook running at the same time.

Cheers!

Your Asus has the AMD 970 chipset which does run hot and the FX8320 is a 125w TDP cpu on a board with a 4+2 VRM that can only handle TDP 140W.

Also due to cpu memory controller limitations the ram needs to run at 1333Mhz for stability.

Appreciate that your pc may have run fine for a number of years but over time and without proper cooling or set up components which are running on the edge of the board's ability start to fail or misbehave.....

Hope this helps

Edited by risk_reversal (Tue 29-Dec-20 21:24:29)

Looks like I will have to get my IR thermometer out...

Have just loaded CPUID and it is showing the SSD Assembly at 25 deg C and the Drive at 94 deg C with the CPU at 50 deg C.

The PC has been on for the last hour or so.

Cheers!