Identifying a faulty memory die in a non-volatile memory storage system. Various methods include: commencing a programming operation of a multi-state block of a subject die, the programming operation including populating a transfer data latch with a first set of data and transferring the data to a first data latch, populating the transfer data latch with a second set of data and transferring the data to second data latch, arranging the first and second data sets in a suitable format of the multi-state block, and writing the data sets to the multi-state block; prior to populating the transfer data latch with the second data set, performing a program suspend and read operation thereby populating the transfer data latch with read data; and comparing the read data to the data contained in the first data latch and, if the comparison results in a match, identifying the subject die as faulty.