PC crashes

[Nick]

System is a bit of  a mixture. Originally bought from a specialist shop but I've re-installed the OS since then. I supplied the system HDD which is a Crucial MX100 512GB SSD.  It's over a year old but hasn't seen much use until recently. The D: drive is a WD Blue 1TB.

What tools do you recommend for testing the disks and their interfaces? Is CHK DSK a good bet, if so which switches?

I can't see from the error log which drive is generating errors - the MX100 is not a bad unit at all - I use those, but it is, technically, a legacy SSD. Having said that, I've never seen a failure on one and Crucial are a very good company (they're the retail arm of Micron, one of the biggest memory manufacturers in the world and in the top 5 world-wide companies for semiconductors generally).

Having said that, they are SATA III drives and I HAVE seen errors on them when using cheap SATA cables (or when using SATA 2 cables - this is a SATA 3 MB & SATA 3 SSD) rather than decent stuff.

Note that there is absolutely no point in exercising an SSD - they have their own internal error checking and will swap out bad memory for good stuff off a spare list - they do this transparently to the host o/s.

What may fail is the signal path to the disk - check the event log for which drive is causing issues, and start from there.

WD Blue drives (the spinning metal ones) are cheap and cheerful - a failure on a non-system drive is unlikely to crash the system unless the pagefile is on it////

chkdsk only repairs the file system - it doesn't exercise the drive.

Western Digital have their own, free, drive diagnostics - Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic (DLGDIAG) - available for download from http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=3

Do backup the WD drive before doing any tests on it - the Extended Tests are supposedly non-destructive, but as something somewhere is already flaky, I'd be cautious.