bad ssd?

[RVD90277]

Hi everyone,

I have a fairly new macbook air. it is less than 1 year old (bought oct 2010). my warranty is up next month.

For the past 2 months I have had a lot of random freezes and crashes. Before 2 months ago, this happened maybe once every 2-3 weeks when I was running snow leopard. I don't use this computer very much as it's not my primary machine but I do use it about 2-3 hours/day.

But 2 months ago I installed lion when it first came out. The crashing got pretty bad. At first it would crash about once/day every 2-3 hours or so. But a few weeks ago it was crashing every 15-20 minutes.

When it crashes, the whole system just freezes and I get the spinning color ball. I am usually on my web browser (google chrome or safari) although it has happened in various apps such as aperture, etc.

There is no way to fix the system other than to do a hard reboot. This is obviously frustrating.

Thinking that it's a software issue, I tried to reinstall lion but rather than reinstalling, it would fail during the install.

Eventually I just pulled out my install usb that i got when i bought the computer and used that to do a full reinstall of snow leopard. That seemed to work.

However, now that I'm on snow leopard, it still crashes every 15-20 minutes. I tried to do a reinstall of snow leopard but it kept failing until eventually I just kept trying and it worked.

I took it to the genius bar but they just did a reinstall of snow leopard from their image and the install worked so they deemed it working. However, when I got home it froze again.

The failure message is pretty generic...along the lines of "unable to install osx. please reinstall operating system", etc.

I will try to take it back to the genius bar but there's really no guarantee that it will freeze. With my luck, it will just keep working while I'm there.

Does the SSD ever go bad in these machines?

This is the 11" MBA with the upgraded ram, upgraded processor, and upgraded SSD drive...basically the most expensive 11" MBA that you could buy last year.

 

[echo.park]

Definitely a hardware issue. Maybe SSD, maybe something else. Some controller or the logic board.

There are several ways to reset the hardware controllers and some other stuff, but I don't remember what it's called. People around this board know it. Someone will come and post it, I'm sure.

You should try this, of it doesn't wok go to the genius bar and ask them to test the whole thing, especially the SSD. But I remember that there's an integrated tool to check your hardware, check the user manual how to access it.

 

[RVD90277]

I have tried using "Disk Utility" to test the hard drive but that passes. It obviously doesn't do any kind of low level test though.

I have tried stuff like reseting the PRAM (which worked once to get snow leopard installed).

I have another appt with the genius bar this weekend but I'm afraid they will just reinstall the OS again and call it a day...

 

[echo.park]

In that case there's nothing more I can tell you. Genius Bar should help. Tell them that only re-installing the OS didn't work in the first place and that you suspect that there's a hardware malfunction.

 

[RVD90277]

genius bar actually did help. i was afraid that they would simply just reinstall the OS again and declare it working.

however they were cool about it and agreed to replace the SSD. they had my computer for 3 days and replaced the SSD and reinstalled the OS on it.

i already had all of my data backed up so i made it easy for them.

the receipt says that it's $600 to replace the 128gb ssd (~$550 for the drive and $50 for labor). good thing it's still under warranty.

i used it last night for about 2 hours and the computer worked fine. i hope this really does fix it.

 

[echo.park]

Glad to hear.