My Gigabyte G5 MF5 laptop has started rebooting with a very brief blue screen whenever the SSD is under heavy load. It usually crashes after about 10 minutes in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and happens almost immediately when starting a sequential-read test in CrystalDiskMark. The SSD is a Gigabyte AG4512G-SI B10 512GB running firmware EGFM15.1. Its temperature stays around 60°C, and CrystalDiskInfo reports 93% health, 7% used, and no media or data integrity errors.
For about a month before the crashes, the whole laptop became extremely sluggish during large downloads, which may have been an early warning sign. After the first few crashes, the system sometimes rebooted with a "no boot device" message because the SSD had temporarily disappeared. That has not happened during the most recent stress tests. Heavy writing, such as downloading a 20GB file, does not seem to trigger the problem.
I have tested in Safe Mode and rolled back a recent Windows update, but the crashes continue. The laptop has an Intel i5-13500H, an RTX 4050 Laptop GPU, and 16GB of RAM. I cannot be completely certain that the SSD is the cause, but the crashes happen during disk testing and the drive previously vanished after a crash. How can I determine whether the SSD is failing or whether another component or driver is responsible?
3 Answers
Try to capture the actual blue-screen information before replacing hardware. Check C:WindowsMinidump after a crash and configure Windows to create small memory dumps if the folder is empty. Also disable automatic restart temporarily so you can read the stop code. The dump may point to a storage driver, graphics driver, memory problem, or another component instead of the SSD itself.
The SSD is a reasonable suspect, especially because it disappeared from the system after earlier crashes. A drive can still show good SMART health while failing under a particular workload or controller state; those health numbers are not a guarantee that the drive is reliable. If possible, back up anything important immediately and test with another known-good NVMe drive. You can also reseat the SSD and inspect the slot and thermal pad, but repeated disappearance under load is enough reason to consider an RMA or replacement.
Since the laptop is fairly specific hardware, isolate the problem methodically: update or reinstall the chipset and storage-controller drivers, check the manufacturer’s BIOS and SSD firmware, run a memory test, and monitor whether the drive remains visible in the BIOS after a crash. A clean Windows installation on a different drive would also help separate software from hardware. Reverting one security update does not rule out a driver or firmware issue, but the temporary “no boot device” symptom still makes the SSD or its connection the leading possibility.
The only update installed just before this began was security update KB5124008, and rolling it back did not change anything. I will check the BIOS, drivers, and memory, but I am leaning toward testing with another SSD because the original drive disappeared after the first crashes.