cfr - mount options and file systems - ext4 mounted as relatime with discard as recommended in the Arch Wiki.
Max-P - thanks for the suggestion but I didn't try it because I found a much simpler solution (see below).
graysky - I did test the machine with another drive and it worked fine.
I tried installing Ubuntu on a separate partition and it got to about a gig in and rebooted.
I tried doing a fresh install of Arch and it got about a gig in and rebooted as well.
From that I concluded it was faulty so didn't bother trying to find a software based solution.
I contacted Amazon to say the drive was faulty and they immediately offered me my money back so I took up the offer.
]]>On my desktop hardware setup (see below), when I installed an SSD I had to add "libata.force=noncq" to the kernel command line options. The drive was behaving erratically (lots of I/O errors) before I did that. Can't remember where I read that tip, but jus' passing it on in case you suffer similarly.
My next consideration is whether it's worth installing Windows on the drive in case its something to do with how Linux handles the cache part of the drive. When copying the files it shows it as a gig through the copy but when it has rebooted only about 600kb have actually copied.
]]>IO scheduler changed to noop - same problem happens
Installed LXDE and copied the folder again - same problem happens
Both times my machine just reboots after copying about 1.5 GB
]]>When I'm copying a large amount of files onto the SSD it sometimes suddenly crashes. Gnome just disappears, some white text streams up a black screen briefly then the laptop turns off.
I first noticed it when I installed Dropbox and it was downloading all my files for the first time.
I've since had it several times when trying to copy my folders of family photos and videos from the ultrabay drive onto the SSD.
I've tried searching for 'gnome 3.6 ssd random crashes' and variations on that.
I've tried looking in /var/log/ for files that look like they might contain useful information but can't find anything.
Any other clues would be gratefully received.
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