My wifes OCZ Agility SSD died and I found out when looking it up that the warranty expired in January 2015. So I broke the seal and went in to see if I can locate a cold solder joint etc, and looked up the info on the silk screen that stated HOOF25-NJ and thats when a google search directed me to what looks like strictly confidential info http://www.docin.com/p-86804510.html

That I am assuming is no longer strictly confidential, but still states that it is. Interesting to see that OCZ bought their boards from this manufacturer that also made boards for a few other companies that offer SSD's. Also they have all sorts of info on what changes were made for the revs etc. Although my board was made 2009.02.25 in between some revisions listed at the site.

The nature of the failure of this SSD is a strange one. I think the controller itself is shot. This SSD wont take an OS INSTALL without crashing and when going into drive management with it connected as a slave drive it will detect the SSD and it GETS as far as trying to create a partition and then it stops RESPONDING and goes out to lunch. Also the drive will sometimes show up and other times its missing from drive management, similar to how a failing HDD with a bad controller will go out to lunch and disappear etc.

I saw that OCZ has a firmware update tool and I might try to update the firmware and see what happens. But I decided to open it up first to look for a cold solder joint etc.

Also took a look at the smart data using crystaldiskinfo and it stated 85% healthy although it has 17000 hours on it.

Anyone had any success in fixing a SSD that is out to lunch like this before? Did a firmware update to it correct the problem?Couple of things to try - firmware update, a secure erase, and the power trick.
To clarify, the secure erase function is built into the drive, I FIND the simplest way is to use the UBCD to boot into Parted Magic and run it from there. There's a shortcut which is named, oddly enough, erase drive, and it's the top option IIRC (don't do the enhanced secure erase if it's offered).
The "power trick" is quite simply, connect the drive to power only, either in its own system or in a system you're using, and just let it sit for a few hours. This lets the drive do any garbage collection and maintenance routines whilst the controller is totally idle. It's not a cure-all by any means and is often suggested as a miracle fix which isn't the case, but it won't do any harm and is always worth a shot with any SSD behaving strangely before binning or returning it if under warranty.

None of the SSDs I've had which have started behaving oddly have ever been fixable and have all been either binned or RMA'd but that's not to say yours won't be fixable - just that I wouldn't bank on it. I suspect you're right in thinking the controller is faulty as that's usually the case when SSDs go faulty as opposed to issues with the flash memory or a solder joint.Thanks for info Calum... I havent tried the power only trick. I have a USB drive dock / stand alone duplicator that I can place it into and have it POWERED to the side without communication to it and try the garbage clean up if the controller still functions enough for this.

So far I tried using OCZToolbox and it wont detect the drive, yet the drive is seen in Disk Management and stays there until I initialize the drive and try to create a partition in which it then disconnects from the system and wont reconnect until a power cycle of the SSD.

Tried to create a partition that was much smaller ( 10MB ) than the maximum capacity to see if it will allocate a small area which if it was successful would indicate a healthy controller but possibly a bad chip that isnt addressed under the smaller size allocation of memory addresses of the NAND flash. But it also fails trying to make a 10MB partition.

Pictures attached show in first image drive requires initialization. Then Pic 2 its initialized. Then Pic 3 is the crash condition that I get with this SSD after about 3 minutes of a Windows 7 cartwheel ring.

I have doubts that I am going to be able to unbrick this SSD, but am going to have it powered offline for a few hours and see what happens.

Done some further google searches and found something that may have caused the drive to crash. Some people reported that using Windows 7 Sleep Mode with these OCZ drives has been known to destroy them. And I implemented Sleep mode to my wifes power management about a month before it died. Something to do with the controller not liking sleep mode. So I think I killed it by using Sleep Mode with this SSD


https://www.google.com/search?q=ocz+drive+destroyed+by+sleep+mode&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/disable-hibernate-ssd-warranty-purposes/



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