Crucial m4 SSD (256)... health and firmware questions

B00kWyrm

Posts: 992   +39
This is a question about assessing the health of the drive...
Here is the story...

On a Win7 - Dell Inspiron R17 laptop,
home use...
in which the ssd was installed as a boot drive (via a clone process)...
.
Seemingly during a Windows update,
the system went into an unrecoverable bluescreen.
Code that was most easily caught was 74 (0x00000074),
BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO (eg Registry errors)
though (long process and a lot of loops through)
we also saw 7B. - INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.
.
Booted with a Linux stick and the ssd was visible / readable.
All I wished to recover here was the app data under USERS.
(Successfully copied the entire USERS folder and sub folders.)

(A full recovery would have been nice as
it had an installation of office 2003 with updates, that are now no longer available,
but... we have the disks and did a reinstall later. Just no security updates available.
Office 2003 is a user-preference issue. Our other machines have more recent versions.)
.
We continued with assessing - finding that,
using either the original drive attached as a usb drive,
or using recovery media,
we were unable to restore to an earlier date.
And we got the message that the hives/registry was/were corrupted.
This was spelled out a couple of times; not just the error code noted above.
.
Could not figure out why this would be true
with the USB hard drive moved to top of the boot sequence,
and the internal drive to bottom...
(And did NOT do a tear down to remove the ssd and reinstall the original hdd)
.
but in any case...
.
Finally reinstalled windows as a complete reinstall as repair attempts had failed.
After getting going with windows again,
A) Went to Dell's site for (1) Health Check and (2) driver updates.
B) Went to Crucial for the Storage Executive toolbox.
.
Dell's health check reports that the SSD (Harddrive) fails some of the tests,
but the screen blanks out before I can do a screen shot.
In any case, they want me to replace the drive.
.
But... Crucial's tools say the drive is perfectly healthy.
.
For those who know about the firmware fix for the hour count issue,
(1) I have the original firmware (000F)
while the latest version (070H) is recommended
with the caveat "The firmware update process is done entirely at your own risk."
(2) Our hour count was no-where near the threshhold
of triggering the original issue that cropped up around 2011-2012.
(Currently about 500 hours, vs the 5000+ hour threshhold).
.
So... The questions...
a. Do I believe Crucial, or do I believe Dell?
I suspect Dells test is geared for spinning platters not for ssds
and so the results may not be valid,
but wondering if there is someone with firm knowledge?

and
b. Do I go ahead and update the firmware?
.
System has been stable for about 36 hours now.
Thanks!
 
Thanks jobeard.
That was my inclination too.
.
So... does anyone know of a reason
a) why I should update the firmware when I am no where near the hour-count threshold that originally produced the problem? (We'll probably replace the machine before we get anywhere near halfway there!)
b) why I should not update the firmware, given the mfg. caveat that we are doing so at our own risk?
 
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