I built a PC about three years ago with a 500GB NVMe drive for the operating system and a 2TB TEAMGROUP CX2 SATA SSD for games and photography files. The SATA SSD worked normally for roughly a year, then games began loading very slowly and stuttering during play. Some newer games would not launch at all, although they worked perfectly when installed on the NVMe drive. Over the past year and a half the problem has worsened: games are now unusable from the SATA drive, and file transfers occasionally cause the drive to stop responding until I restart the computer. CrystalDiskInfo reports good health and CrystalDiskMark shows normal transfer speeds. The drive has plenty of free space, and deleting most of its contents did not help. I have already reseated the connections and tried another SATA port. Could this be a failing cable, power connection, or SSD, and what else should I troubleshoot?
2 Answers
Because this is a SATA drive, test the physical connections before concluding that the SSD itself is dead. Try a completely different SATA data cable, another motherboard SATA port, and a different SATA power connector from the power supply if possible. A damaged cable or unreliable power connection can cause freezes, disappearing drives, and failed transfers even if benchmarks happen to complete normally.
Check the Windows Event Viewer or the drive's SMART attributes for CRC errors, uncorrectable errors, unsafe shutdowns, or controller resets. A rising SATA CRC error count often points to the data cable or connection, while uncorrectable errors and repeated resets suggest the SSD is failing. Copy the data off the drive first, then test it; avoid relying only on CrystalDiskMark because a short benchmark may not reveal intermittent faults.
I already reseated the cable and tried another SATA port, but I have not yet tested a different data cable or power connector. I will try both, since the symptoms could fit an intermittent connection.