Strange m.2 SSD issues - broken?

[Helmi74]

Hey there,

I'm running my CustoMac for a few weeks and am quite happy with everything working. Today I started seeing strange issues what looks like a broken M.2 SSD (SM951 AHCI)

Here's my drive setup:

- m2 SSD SM951 512GB with OSX 10.11.6 running good (main usage)
- Samsung 850pro running Windows 10
- WD Red 6TB for local Time Machine Backup, CCC Backup and some file storage (replacement for a 3TB WD Green that showed some errors)

Until yesterday everything ran fine - when i booted the machine this morning it ran good first but after 10 minutes applications suddenly closed and all I could do is a hard reset to reboot. Then everything again worked fine with the same thing happening after a while. After some tries I found out that this at some point happens when the system writes to the disk. So I could use some applications still but as soon as they had to load something or save something they were just dissappearing. I hadn't seen this before but tried to bootup the cloned installation from the CCC copy and apart from the horrible slowness (Hard disk) it ran well without seeing this problem after some time.

I tried booting into rescue but no OSX rescue partition (not the one on the SSD and not the one on the Hard drive) seems to boot up. Also when booting the cloned copy the SSD isn't visible from the system. /dev/disk0 is just missing. Interestingly enough I can still boot from the SSD seeing the same errors again. Also when booting into Windows the drive isn't seen.

Did anyone see something similar yet?

Apart from searching for the cause I would alreday continue to prepare for an exchange. I wonder what the best way is to transfer not only the files from the cloned image but also the EFI partition to a new drive? As i can't have two M.2 drives in the system i need to take and image or whatever from the drive but as I don't see it in any other system that could be difficult

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

[Helmi74]

This keeps beeing strange. The issue still is identically though i have proceeded a bit. The day over I worked on the cloned copy of the system via the hard drive. This worked without any issues (besides beeing horribly slow).

I also downloaded Clonezilla to be able to clone my drive but noticed that i can't see the M2 SSD there. I downloaded the alternate stable which is newer and does support M2 SSDs. It showed up there on first try but disappeared from the periodically updated device list after a few secs. When booting now i additionally get this error:

AHCI Controller reset failed

Which I didn't get before. Is there maybe an issue with the controller on the motherboard? Interestingly the drive boots reliably via UEFI boot still and only shows the identical problems than described above after around 10-15 minutes after booting. The drive also shows up in BIOS.

Maybe all this also is the reason why the drive doesn't show up after booting from the cloned drive.

 

[Helmi74]

Luckily I quickly got a new drive in exchange but unfortunately no changes.

To me this looks like the mainboard maybe broken when it comes to the M.2 Slot. Will try to get a new one from Amazon and see how it goes.