Let me make clear from the start: there’s no urgency in getting this drive to work. It’s a 10+ year old SSD, probably one of SanDisk’s first generation, which I pulled from a crappy old netbook and was using to breathe life into another old laptop. After discovering this quirky failure I’ve pulled it and have it hooked up as a 3rd physical drive in a desktop for testing.
The drive shows up in WD Dashboard with 100% health. I’ve done SMART tests, both short and long, which show no problems. I can format the drive, copy a video file over and it seems to play from the drive just fine.
If I reboot the system, the data is unaffected.
If I shutdown the system, even for a few seconds, on reboot the drive is gone. I can go into disk management, select MBR or GPT for the MFT, format NTFS or exFAT (tried both), copy a video file over and again it plays fine, only for it all to disappear again on shutdown.
Out of curiosity I disabled write caching to see if that might solve things, but no effect.
Firmware version is the latest according to WD Dashboard at 3.1. I do wonder if downgrading to an older firmware version might fix this, but I can’t find any firmware files anywhere.
If anyone has any other thoughts, or can provide an explanation as to what’s probably happening here, I’m certainly curious.
