[RndTbl] weird ssd image issue

Trevor Cordes trevor at tecnopolis.ca
Thu Oct 30 19:52:19 CDT 2014


I made a drive image of an SSD using dd a while back.  I had to go back
to the image to do a repair, and something is wrong with the image.
When put back on the SSD and a boot is attempted, Windows7 won't boot.
I check it with linux and it says the main NTFS FS is corrupted.  I run
fixes on it and I can mount it and look at many files, but every 50 or
so files generates an I/O error when listing the directory entry, let
alone trying to read the file.

I do these types of images all the time and consider myself an expert
at it, and never have these types of problems (even on source disks
that are already dying).

One of the only things I could come up with is I noticed while doing
this image restore that the customer (who built it themselves) had used
a SATA2 cable on a 6Gb/s SATA3 port (and the SSD is 6Gb/s).  Could this
have caused corruption of data "on the wire"?  Is that even possible?
Would wire-caused errors be detected by the mobo, or is it just the
drive that does checksums?  Do 6G mobos and drives detect when a 3G
cable is used and downshift to 3G?

The system seemed to run fine for a year setup this way, so perhaps the
errors are very infrequent but doing the image at full-blast reading
the whole 120GB in a few mins caused this problem?

The SSD died (actually, is dying) 3 weeks after the image was made, so
there is also a chance the drive was just screwing up already and
giving me back bad data.  However, the customer had no problems with
Windows during the 3 weeks until I/O started showing up in Windows.

Lastly, can a mis-wiring like this kill an SSD?  This is an OCZ Vertex
420 drive (a brand I don't sell, but they bought elsewhere) and we
already have RMA'd the drive once, and it definitely is dead a 2nd time
now.  Either OCZ SSDs suck bad, or perhaps something else is going on?
Perhaps a mis-wiring can cause the SSD to detect errors and request
re-dos from the OS causing a multiplication of writes?  Just guessing
here.  Most likely the OCZ just sucks rocks.  I read some other people
on the net having real big problems with dying OCZ SSDs.


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