I'm having a confusing issue with my SSD. I will describe some of the symptoms.

• Randomly the GUI will crash. The launcher and panel disappear, programs won't launch and eventually everything blanks out.


• I can switch to another TTY, but when I try to log in I get the message
  
  

  
  

  I/O error, dev sda, sector [some sector number]

  
  



• I then have to force reboot my machine at which point the BIOS fails to recognize my disk and leaves me at a blank command prompt.


• The first time this happened, I thought my drive was dead, but it turns out if I just shut down my machine and start it back up, the drive appears again and I can boot into Ubuntu.

It seems like everything points to a failing drive. BUT besides this issue I can't find any evidence of this.

• All the SMART tests are positive.


• I've run e2fsck on both partitions and it seemed to be fine.


• I rad badblocks to check for bad sectors and nothing was found.


• I've checked dmesg after an incident and nothing jumps out.


• Most importantly, this issue is reproducible. As long as I force shut down, then bring the machine back up, everything is fine for an hour or so. If I reset the machine, the BIOS can't load the drive. I've done this probably 10 times now and the results are always the same.

I just don't know what else to check now. I'm fine with getting a new drive if I need to, but since I can't actually prove that it's broken, I don't want to replace it unnecessarily.

Basically, can anyone recommend any other tests or debugging steps to prove one way or another the state of my disk?

At Tom Brossman's suggestion, I tried switching the SATA port used by the drive. This had no effect. I also changed SATA cables which didn't work either.

Here's the output of e2fsck.

Here's the output of `badblocks -v'

Drive information

SMART status