I'm having trouble with my NVMe SSD after experiencing a complete system freeze on Arch Linux. I was running quite a few applications, including multiple Firefox tabs and a VM, which caused my 16GB RAM to fill up. After about 10–15 minutes of freezing without any recovery, I had to force shut down my laptop. Since then, the SSD has shown issues—it's hard to boot, sometimes it isn't detected, and I'm getting I/O errors. I'm trying to figure out if this forced shutdown caused the SSD failure or if it was already on its way out. Has anyone else dealt with NVMe drives acting up, especially under heavy load?
3 Answers
It sounds like the SSD itself didn't fail hardware-wise but rather that the forced shutdown likely corrupted the disk. Try booting from a live USB and see if the SSD shows up using 'lsblk'. If it does, run 'fsck' to check for corruption. This situation usually happens when a computer is left in a bad state for too long. If 'fsck' doesn't help, you might need to reinstall your OS. If the SSD keeps failing, it might be time for a new one, unfortunately! Good luck!
Did you have swap configured? If not, relying solely on zram can put excessive load on the disk during memory overflow, leading to issues. A swapfile or partition might be a better option in case of heavy usage.
Zram can indeed behave strangely when your RAM gets completely maxed out. If you're pushing your system to its limits, it's worth considering setting up a proper swap space to help with memory management. It could help prevent further SSD damage.
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