Replacement SSD for 2014 Blade - benchmark and observations.

Last Wednesday, my beloved 2014 Razer Blade's 512gb SSD experienced a catastrophic failure, resulting in the drive being undetectable by any means, including the system BIOS. I purchased this Blade from the Microsoft Store, and bought a 2-year service warranty for it, but a story goes with that (continued below the benchmark results).

In any case, I wound up purchasing a replacement from Amazon at my own cost, and installing it myself. I don't have any old benchmark results from the original Samsung 512gb SSD, but my feeling is that this drive benchmarks a bit faster than my original drive. Here is a Crystal Diskmark screenshot of my benchmark (Windows 8.1 Pro, drive was fully loaded with OS and all application and gaming software, so it's probably 40% full - I ran a trim right before running the test):

The replacement drive is the Transcend model TS512GMTS800.



Now for my observations.

Firstly, about the Microsoft service agreement. A very polite person explained that my only option was to hand-deliver the unit to a Microsoft Store at a pre-arranged appointment time, and that the repair would be done while I waited (they agreed with my diagnosis, and promised a suitable replacement drive would be available at the time of the appointment). Unfortunately for me, the nearest Microsoft store is in Overland Park, KS, and is nearly a 3 hour drive from where I live. I told the support person that a trip was not feasible for me at this time, and I needed another option. After a long debate on Microsoft's end, they agreed to have someone else contact me (in 48 to 72 hours) to talk about shipment to a repair depot. It was at that time that I privately concluded I was going to have to do the repair myself if I didn't want to hassle with a trip or a long wait and possibly risk an overly-complicated return/repair process (they were obviously struggling to offer me any process for repair at all that didn't involve 6 hours of travel-time by me).

I found the Transcend drive on Amazon (with Prime delivery) for about $232 (probably not the cheapest, but acceptable), and ordered for overnight delivery. The drive arrived early the next afternoon, and the repair (I had already opened the case, removed the two cable connections covering the drive, and carefully uninstalled the drive myself - BTW, is the white, gummy stuff stuck to the bottom of the original drive a thermal compound, or just something to physically stabilize the drive? I re-used it, in any case.) Repair went perfectly, and was a 2 out of 10 on the difficulty scale, IMO. Nearly as easy as swapping a drive in a desktop PC.

Secondly, and I am almost hesitant to mention this, since I can offer no explanation for why this would be true, I believe replacing the drive has solved my longtime problem on this unit with the well-reported graphics glitch where the colors all suddenly shift to a similar hue - often happening upon waking the system up, or waking the display from a blanked screen. In the days prior to the drive failure, I had noted an alarming increase in the frequency of these occurrences, and was worried that something might be (more) wrong.

Since the replacement last Friday (this is being written on Monday), I haven't seen the glitch a single time, making this the longest period of glitch-free usage since taking delivery of the machine.

Can anyone offer an explanation of how the graphics glitch could possibly be related to a problem with the SSD?

Thanks for reading.