WD SN850 panic

[trs96]

I would do the hardware check first and then look into other causes.

When in Windows download the WD app as well and check what that reports. There may also possibly be a firmware update. https://wddashboarddownloads.wdc.com/wdDashboard/DashboardSetup.exe

 

[Bergier3K]

@trs96 I actually wondered about a firmware update. But I was uncertain if updating the firmware under windows would not break my macOs installation. Could you confirm it can be attempted without risk for the install (other than the normal risks that could also occur under windows) ?

 

[trs96]

But I was uncertain if updating the firmware under windows would not break my macOs installation. Could you confirm it can be attempted without risk.

I would make a full bootable backup before doing anything else. See what Crystal Disk info says about the drive health first then go from there. I can't ever guarantee there's no risk in updating firmware. It's your choice whether or not to try that.

 

[trs96]

If there is an actual hardware problem, know that WD gives you a five year warranty and will replace your NVMe. First you have to prove that the drive is the actual cause of the boot problems. If it's something to do with your EFI folder or Ventura, they obviously won't replace the drive.

 

[Bergier3K]

@trs96 Thanx for the help, I will post the results. I laughed a bit for myself, wouldn't it be grand to call WD complaining about the lack of compatibility with a hackintosh Maybe it should be made a special event on tonymacx86 every 1st of april, calling the big names of hardware complaining about the lack of hackintosh support !

Though it's good to know the warranty is 5 years, I assumed it to be 2 years.

 

[trs96]

NVMe SSDs are very reliable. It's difficult to write so much data to them that could actually "wear out" the drive. Depending on the size you bought it can be up to 1,200 TB written by their estimates. Even that may be conservative. The fact that WD SN850 drives have their own DDR4 DRAM cache makes them even more durable over time.

Most of the problems occur when these PCIe 4.0 drives run too hot. If there's no heatsink on the drive itself it's going to get very hot under intensive use. That's just what happens with those high read/write speeds you'll get. I've probably bought 40 or more SSDs the past ten years and never seen one fail. Most have been sata based. My two Crucial M4 drives are still at over 50% life remaining with daily use for over ten years ! They are MLC NAND Flash based and not the less durable TLC or QLC nearly everyone uses today.

The SN850 models have been replaced by the SN850X which sells for much lower prices than shown. There is no 500GB SN850X. They start at 1TB and go up to 4TB.

 

[trs96]

Even a relatively small 250GB Samsung 840 TLC drive could write huge amounts of data before failing.

The 840 Series sailed smoothly up to 800 TB. But it suffered another spate of uncorrectable errors on the way to 900TB, and it died without warning before reaching a petabyte. Although the 840 Series had retired thousands of flash blocks up until that point, the SMART attributes suggested plenty of reserves remained.

From: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/

 

[Bergier3K]

That is indeed impressive, and reminding me of people back in 2006-7 saying SSD technology would never be lasting enough !

For my configuration high speeds and heat are not a problem : I run the nvme at pcie3 and the z490 xtreme is heatsink galore, including on the 3m.2 slots, with thermal paste. istats tells me the drive is usually under 40°C.

 

[trs96]

I run the nvme at pcie3 and the z490 xtreme is heatsink galore,

Those 7,000 MB/s sequential read speeds really don't make any real world difference in everyday use. 3,500 is plenty fast enough and will probably extend the lifespan of the drive. It's mostly the people that take benchmarks too seriously that have to own the very fastest everything. Then they even overclock their CPU to waste even more energy for small percentage gains in performance.

 

[pastrychef]

As far as I know, the "ThirdPartyDrives" quirk just enables Trim on SATA SSDs. It should have no effect on your NVMe SSD.