Bitlocker partitions disappear from laptop SSD

Question

Hi,
I upgraded my laptop with a 512 GB Crucial MX100 SSD. The first SSD starting pausing for a minute or so every so often, then longer and longer. Finally
after a couple of days, the data partitions disappeared and were coded as RAW.
I replaced the SSD with the same model and restored the partitions leaving 100GB free space after the C Drive and left the last partition un-encrypted.
Today, the three bitlocker'd partitions are wiped again. Instead of saying RAW, they say nothing, just 0 for used and free space with File System
blank, but that might change if I reboot.
I left 100 GB unused for garbage collection (20%) and future emergency space, and other than doing "quick" formats, then bitlockering, then
loading data, there has not been much disk activity.
Partition
Drive
Space
Bitlocker
Primary
SR
350 MB
No
Primary
C:
Unallocated
220 GB
100 GB
P
Primary
T:
28 GB
P
Logical
H:
32 GB
P
Logical
M:
24 GB
P
Logical
U:
73 GB
No
The wiped drives were bitlockered, but C: didn't get wiped. T: and M: unlock automatically during the boot and H: unlocks manually.
There is no TPM in this machine so encryption is done at the OS level.
As far as I know, there hasn't been any power fail as the machine was left on last night and came out of hibernation OK this morning. I do not know when the drives messed up this time but they were OK yesterday. Windows Defender
says it is up to date.
Any suggestions as to which of Bitlocker, Win 8.1, the laptop (Aspire 3830TG-6415), or the SSD could be wiping the partitions?
I was wondering if it could be some mess up with TRIM between Windows 8.1 Disk Formatting, Bitlocker, and the SSD's automatic garbage collection?
Thanks, Bob.

Answer 1

Update:
It’s still too early for me to tell what is actually causing the problem. I found two great articles at Anandtech (X-25-M SSD and SSD Anthology) and decided to approach this differently. The problem may arise out of improperly formatting and then bitlockering
the partitions.
Before this, I really did not know much about the details of SSDs, particularly Garbage Collection and TRIM, or that the drives themselves needed unallocated space and idle time to unclog themselves. I now think there is a possibility that there may be a
firmware bug in the MX100 or a problem with respect to formatting Bitlocker volumes in Windows 8.1, which combined with a naïve user (me) can confuse the drive. Again, I am positing this as a possibility.
In the past, I have ALWAYS performed a full format on any HDD I ever used, in the machine that it is supposed to live in. Rather naively, I did that with the first SSD ten days ago. On top of that, I bitlocked the partitions after initialization and before
use. Except, once I might of reformatted and re-bitlocked a partition.
I now know that this would be a no-no in the SSD world, especially if TRIM was not working correctly for full formats, or time was not given for the SSD to perform a garbage collection, or Bitlocker did not pass TRIM commands correctly.
Since all the SSD sectors were used in the first drive, and all were written to possibly at least twice in a short while, the drive had a lot of page cleaning to do.
I suspect now, that somehow I might have managed to overload the MX100’s ability to garbage collect the bitlocker partitions and as a result, with something going haywire, the index to TRIMmed or garbage collected SSD pages got messed up. The drive, if this
is the problem, then managed somehow to clean its blocks AFTER I had restored data to them, thereby wiping data, resulting in completely NULL pages.
With this in mind, I reconfigured the partitions yesterday and left more unallocated space. I quick formatted the partitions, Bitlocked them, waited for a couple of hours, then restored data. There is now 108GB of unallocated drive space, plus another 54GB
of free space in the U drive (162GB) against 72GB of new, encrypted partitions. So far they have held up today. I do not know if this is really needed, overkill, or what.
Normally, with unencrypted volumes, there is enough unallocated file space that the SSD has lots of pages to work with. With fully encrypted volumes, they only have their own reserve to work with.
The current configuration is:
Partition
Drive
Space
Bitlocker
Primary
SR
350 MB
No
Primary
C:
Unallocated
220 GB
100 GB
P
Primary
M:
28 GB
P
Logical
H:
Unallocated
48 GB
8 GB
P
Logical
U:
73 GB
No
Bob.