Windows 8 Killed my SSDs

Solution 1:

Make sure you're running the latest firmware on your Crucial M4s. There is a well-known firmware bug that causes the drives to misbehave (causing BSODs in Windows) every hour or so, once the drives have hit 5184 power-on hours.

You can use a SMART diagnostic such as CrystalDiskInfo or smartmontools to check the power-on hours and see if you recently passed the magic number.

Crucial patched this bug in a January 2012 firmware update.  The update leaves your data intact, but you should back up anything important first, even if it requires several 1-hour sessions and you have to do it in chunks.