SSD Weird Failure
Hi everyone. I've got a weird SSD failure and I'd like some input before I decide what to do with it.
Setup: Old desktop I keep in my dorm for simple tasks. Boot drive is a Lexar NS100 512GB SATA SSD (Windows installed on it) plus an HDD for storage. It ran fine for about 7 months.
What happened: I left the PC on for about 2 hours, and when I came back I was greeted by the black "Reboot and Select proper Boot device" screen. In the BIOS, only the HDD was detected, the SSD was completely missing.
I opened the case and reseated the cables around the drives. After that, the SSD was detected again and Windows booted as far as the account-selection screen, then a blue screen of death. On the next boot, Windows froze at the logo. The boot after that, the boot-device error was back.
Since then the SSD has been playing hide-and-seek with the BIOS: sometimes it's detected, then after a reboot or even just exiting the BIOS, it vanishes from the storage-device list again.
Ruling things out: At first I suspected the SATA cable, or maybe my PSU since it's been acting weird for a while. So I connected the SSD to my laptop with a SATA-to-USB adapter, different computer, different cable, different power source. Same behavior: the drive shows up fine at first (correct capacity, directories all visible), stays alive for a minute or two, then disappears. Every attempt to copy files off it fails before finishing. And here's the confusing part: CrystalDiskInfo reports the drive as healthy.
My leading theory: it's not cables or power, because it fails identically on two completely different machines. It looks like firmware/FTL corruption, the controller powers up and identifies itself normally (which is why SMART looks fine), but once it has to work through the damaged region of its mapping tables, it locks up and drops off the bus entirely.
Does that theory hold up? And has anyone actually gotten data off an NS100 in this state themselves, or is this professional-data-recovery-or-nothing territory?