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Do some solid state drives have a hard time dealing with instructions when they have low free space? Or should I expect that the drive is at the end of its life (at just over 1 year)?

Background:

My friend has a Toshiba Q Series (Model: THNSNJ256GCST) solid state drive that is about a year old and while downloading a game (~50 GB) from Steam, it became completely unresponsive. His computer suddenly locked up, rebooted and then told him he had no OS.

On the off chance that it could be recovered, he left it with me to see what I could do about recovering the drive or at least some of the files. I was able to do so with the help of another topic.

Before the drive was fixed:

Whenever I had the drive connected to my computer, the boot processes took a minute or two longer when detecting devices. Almost like the BIOS recognized a device there, tried to identify it, couldn't and decided to move on after a timeout period.

Using the answer linked above, I connected the drive to power only, turned the computer on for about 20 minutes, shut down the computer, connected the data cable and the drive was then recognized. When I tried to copy a large number of files off of the drive through Windows File Explorer, the drive became unresponsive again.

I was able to do this again after leaving it connected, power only, to my computer for about 8 hours while at work the next day (20-30 minutes didn't work this time). This time I used batch scripts to transfer the files and then deleted the game files from the drive. Since then it seems to be working fine (I'll update on this if the drive becomes unresponsive again).

With the downloaded files, the drive only had about 10% free space left on it, which leads me to wonder if it just needs a certain amount of free space to work correctly.

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Daniel T.
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With the downloaded files, the drive only had about 10% free space left on it, which leads me to wonder if it just needs a certain amount of free space to work correctly.

The file system free space shouldn't have any appreciable impact on how well the storage device functions. It certainly shouldn't cause the drive to not be detected at all by the system firmware (historically BIOS, these days most often UEFI).

When I tried to copy a large number of files off of the drive through Windows File Explorer, the drive became unresponsive again.

Well, to answer the question in the title: I can't say for sure that this drive is about to die, but I can tell you that I wouldn't trust it for anything after it behaving like you describe. Even more so because if you are unlucky, misbehaving storage devices on SATA can freeze the whole system, and not just the one device that is having difficulties.

Check SMART data; that might give a clue as to what the problem is. Note that some drives are known to be notorious liars in SMART, and even if it doesn't and SMART indicates everything is well within the drive's intended operational limits that doesn't mean that the drive is fine. The BIOS might have a feature that allows you to run a self-test; if so, run a short self-test and look at the results, but treat the results as just one more data point and certainly not an absolute truth either way.

Even if the drive is nominally usable, I would consider it to be going through the final stages of dying, get as much of the important data off it as I could, and replace it. If it's still under warranty, return it to the manufacturer or reseller through their RMA process after getting the data off it.

Properly spec'd SSDs don't die from normal use, but unfortunately SSDs' failure modes tend to be pretty much catastrophic: it's happily chugging along one moment, then completely dead the next, and there's little to nothing you can do about it. This is because the primary failure with modern SSDs isn't so much flash failure as controller problems. (All the stories you hear about SSDs failing early are very likely to be controller problems, much more so than flash wear.)

While you're telling your friend that he will need to buy a new drive, also explain to him the value of proper backups. (Local, secondary storage or online backups in the cloud; just something that can be used to restore a system to bare metal.) He might very well thank you profusely later.

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