I thought I would share this with you all after I've had over a week of hassle with my Intel 520 SSD. It turns out the filmware is crap and will sometime just disable itself and go into semi permanent hibernation and vanish from your system
History
I turned on my pc last week No boot drive - strange
Went into bios and the intel ssd had disappeared
did all usual tests checked leads secure etc.. No Luck
Swopped sata leads and power cable - no luck
Rang up PC Specialist support checked bios settings etc... No luck They informed me to send in my SSD for testing
so installed windows onto my other ocz ssd and sent the intel 520 back for testing
Few days later is sent back - drive is working
Very strange - So I did some research on the web mainly on the intel forums and found out that the driver awful and this was a common recurring problem. (Umm could be why they have discontinued the 520 ssd) .
But I did find a post on how to reawaken (fix) the ssd.
This is easier if you have a hot swop port on your pc or if you don't like me you will just have to cross fingers and be brave.
You need to turn on your pc as now and let windows boot.
Once your pc has loaded windows etc.. you then need disconnect the power from the ssd and replug it in after a couple of seconds
Once you have done this the ssd will awaken then appear in disk management.
You can then install the latest intel filmware for this drive - https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/18363/Intel-Solid-State-Drive-Firmware-Update-Tool
Hopefully your data will still be all there I reformed mine as I didn't want 2 versions of windows 8.1 on my pc. Windows has trouble enough with just one version
I hope this helps anyone else in the future who had the same problems as I did
History
I turned on my pc last week No boot drive - strange
Went into bios and the intel ssd had disappeared
did all usual tests checked leads secure etc.. No Luck
Swopped sata leads and power cable - no luck
Rang up PC Specialist support checked bios settings etc... No luck They informed me to send in my SSD for testing
so installed windows onto my other ocz ssd and sent the intel 520 back for testing
Few days later is sent back - drive is working
Very strange - So I did some research on the web mainly on the intel forums and found out that the driver awful and this was a common recurring problem. (Umm could be why they have discontinued the 520 ssd) .
But I did find a post on how to reawaken (fix) the ssd.
This is easier if you have a hot swop port on your pc or if you don't like me you will just have to cross fingers and be brave.
You need to turn on your pc as now and let windows boot.
Once your pc has loaded windows etc.. you then need disconnect the power from the ssd and replug it in after a couple of seconds
Once you have done this the ssd will awaken then appear in disk management.
You can then install the latest intel filmware for this drive - https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/18363/Intel-Solid-State-Drive-Firmware-Update-Tool
Hopefully your data will still be all there I reformed mine as I didn't want 2 versions of windows 8.1 on my pc. Windows has trouble enough with just one version
I hope this helps anyone else in the future who had the same problems as I did