I have a Dell XPS developer laptop that came pre-installed with Ubuntu. When I received the laptop, I replaced the SSD with a 500+GB NVMe drive and installed Mint. For the first 8-10 months of use, I hadn't had any problems.

About a month ago, I encountered this strange problem where my file system became read-only. I only discovered this when I tried to save a document. On reboot I was told to run FSCK manually and did to find some errors that needed correcting. Since this problem occurred I started to see this problem more frequently and now it can be almost every hour.

is my NVMe drive failing? I did a check with the nvme command and all of the numbers looked "normal" to me, but I admit I am not an expert when it comes to this. I hesitate to think the drive is failing only because it isn't very old and I don't use this computer very often. Is there anything I can do to try and hunt for a solution?

Have you checked the drive for a loose connection?

Also, you could install GSmartControl and post the SMART attributes here, as well as performing a Short and/or Extended Self Test.

Replying in reverse order. My understanding is smartctl does not yet support NVMe drives. Is there another tool I can use to get a good diagnostic?

Because this drive is installed in a laptop, I don't want to be opening it if I don't have to. It wasn't exactly the first time I did it and I only want to do this if I actually need to replace the drive.

According to https://www.smartmontools.org/, SMART is built-in to most modern NVMe drives.

It could well be a loose connection causing an intermittent connection failure. You're not going to know that if you don't open the laptop, check the connection, and take out and re-insert the relevant connector. If you're too nervous about doing this yourself then you need to find someone who can do it for you.

If it's NVME, then it's an m.2 connector, and the drive is actually screwed into the connector, so I HUGELY doubt it could be a loose connection (this is one of the reasons for the design of the m.2 slot, it makes it pretty much impossible to have a loose connection if it's screwed in without physical damage).

I would second the checking SMART status.

And like any hardware, there's the occasional piece that simply is bad right out of the box, it's possible you've got a bad controller on your drive.

Here's what I am seeing with GSmartControl. Does this mean my drive doesn't have SMART on it?

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Well that's annoying.

Is this the beastie?

https://ark.intel.com/products/94924...3_0-x4-3D1-TLC

If so, https://communities.intel.com/thread/107153 recommends using Intel's Solid State Drive Toolbox or CrystalDiskInfo.

Neither of these seem to have a Linux version.

https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/...d-storage.html suggests that Linux users use the o/s-agnostic SSD Firmware Update ISO at https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26491?v=t. I assume that this tool incorporates diagnostics and that you don't need to choose to do any actual firmware updates. You may want to make a relevant backup beforehand just in case.

Some boot tools, e.g. Hiren’s BootCD, incorporate CrystalDiskInfo.

In general, it's looking as if you may need to get the drive replaced under warranty (it appears to have a 5-year manufacturer's warranty), but I think it is a good idea to at least have a go at reading the drive's SMART data first.

I would contact intel service/support now and tell them the situation and ask for a warranty replacement:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...upport.html#@3

They will tell you what you need to do as far as running diagnostics and where to get them for linux if that is required. They may just give you an rma without further ado. I think it is highly probable that the drive is failing.

Any news on this? I' m also having the same problem on my Razer Blade Stealth and Samsung 960 EVO 512gb SSD