Thinkpads Forum

I brought a ThinkPad X201 used and replaced it with Kingston 256GB SSD drive. Used IBM provided recover discs to install Win 7 Professional. I also installed Office Professional 2007 and Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom 3.6 etc. The whole system set up and run in June 2011. It was really fast when using the SSD. The main reason to change to SSD for the reliability of the data. However, last week (it was about 9 month since using the SSD), the SSD drive crashed. The system was running normal on that day, until I click on a program, it said "the program is not able to start 0x00". all the other programs were running properly, after I restart the system, it was giving me two options: running recovery (recommended) or boot as normal. ether of these options were not able to start the OS. During a restart, it automatically run the check disc, and found dozens of errors. After the check disc, it was still not able to start the OS.

One day before the crash, I used Lightroom to process about hundred images, and deleted about hundred images (did not empty the deleted the trash). On the same day before the crash, I moved about hundred of emails from inbox to Achieved folders in Outlook (Office 2007). Other than those, just used word, excel, excess, email, web browser, etc.

My questions for the experts or experienced users in this forum are:
1) Anyone had experiences similar crash on the SSD drive.
2) Can anyone provide any insight to show what could be a cause of this crash.
3) Anything we need to be aware of to prevent this happen again.

I brought a regular hard drive (5400rpm) to replace the SSD, but I found the speed is significantly slower.

Thank y'all

Welcome to the forum!
It is not clear from the description above if the failure is due to the SSD or factor(s) unrelated to the SSD which corrupted Windows files and/or partition information.

If you can connect the drive as an additional drive to a working system, then you can assess if the partition/file structure on the drive is still intact. If yes, then the failure probably is not due to the SSD -- it is likely a "normal" failure/corruption of the contents of the disk which is unrelated to the disk hardware. On the other hand, if the partition table(s) and/or file(s) on the disk are "gone", then it is likely that there was a catastrophic hardware failure on the SSD.

Note: These days, there is no reason whatsoever to use a 5400RPM drive. A 7200RPM drive will feel closer in speed to an SSD than to a 5400RPM drive.

Thank you for your respond.

When I connect the SSD as an external drive to a working system, I can see all the files in the SSD drive. One thing I have been wondering is if the OS (even Win 7 Professional), or Office 2007, or other programs don't know how to react to the SSD drive properly and can cause the file failure/corruption. If this is true or highly possible than regular hard drives, it's going to be terrible idea to use SSD because the data liability.

Speak to the RPM speed of the regular hard drive I brought, after the SSD issue, I asked the sales person, which hard drive is more reliable regardless the speed. He suggested to the 5400RPM. After installation, it is slow. Right now, I'm thinking of switch to another 7200RPM drive, or switch back to the SSD (256gb) I had issue last week. But I really worry about it would haunt me again. If anyone knows what went wrong (for example, there is known issue with Office 2007 on the SSD, etc), or what need to do to prevent it happen.

Three points:
1) The sales person who told you that 5400 RPM drives are more reliable than 7200RPM drives is, at best, 10 years out of date! If you are going to use a mechanical drive, then use a 7200RPM drive -- this is not a "debatable" point, so don't waste your time figuring out who is right ...

2) There is nothing about an SSD that is "special" to the machine compared to a mechanical drive. As far as the machine and operating system are concerned, the SSD is just another SATA drive, and -- for the purposes of this discussion -- the machine and the operating system don't care at all that the drive is SSD or mechanical disk. Whatever problem you had, the reason for it is not that the drive was solid state.

3) Given that the file system on the SSD is intact, it sounds like you experienced a failure as the result of the loss/corruption of critical Windows files, something which could have occurred for a variety of reasons. Chances are that you will never discover why it happened. However, you can be reasonably certain that the problem did not happen because you were using an SSD ... and I think that was your original concern.