SSD Died on me yesterday

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Yesterday My computer shut off and would not recognize the HDD. I went thru all the troubleshooting steps and determined that the SSD had died. Went to best buy, bought another one, plugged it in and restored from my image. Luckily i keep current complete images of the system. It worked perfect and i was up and running in about an hour.

Here are some things that i learned due to this happening.

1) SanDisk appears to be a decent company for warranty. My drive is less than a year old and they appear to be happy to replace it. They issued an RMA and sent me a shipping label. I did not receive my drive yet but feel comfortable that i will.

2)SSDs are a bit more sensitive than regular HDD's in some areas. One of the major killers are voltage sags or power outages. If you have a SSD computer i would highly recommend putting it on a UPS. Im not certain if this killed mine but it is possible.

One afternoon my wife moved the computer desk and all the stuff that went with it. After this failure I started troubleshooting and found that the only thing that my UPS was protecting was a desk lamp and the wireless mouse. Phew! at least those are safe. The rest of the equipment was plugged into a standard power strip which was plugged directly into the wall.

Just thought i would share and pass along some things i learned about SSD's
 
Good comments..

I would add that a failure within a year is "infant mortality" for electronics. When electronics are really old they experience "MTBF" end-of-life failures.

'Power Sags' are compensated for by the power supply in the PC or laptop, the SSD is buffered from this. Ditto for 'power spikes' this is actually rare, power spikes are 'free power' on the 120V AC, it just does not happen, the loading on the hydro lines outside is too high to allow it. However, Lightening strikes on a hydro pole and wires does produce fast transient spikes that can blow the power supply in the PC or laptop, if you are unlucky, they can also blow a UPS, rare but possible.

In one case I had a PC where the power supply fried, the failure mode forced higher then 12V DC on an old style HD, burning up the circuit board on the drive. Then power supply "crow barred" and blew it's internal fuse!! Toast!!

Having a UPS is great, I use one, my hydro went off once, I was so into working on the PC that I never noticed the room going black around me until the UPS started beeping!! (my eyes where planted on the screen)

TIP: always keep ink jet printers on a power bar you turn off when not in use. When the power fails and comes back, even for a second, sneaky manufacturers design printers to turn on and pull the ink cartridge out of the 'park' position, it sits there for hours waiting to print and the print head dries out, you spend another $35 to replace it!!!
 
Crucial MX drives (at least some of them) have a built in feature so they don't suffer total data loss/destruction when the power suddenly cuts. I recommend getting one of those next time. That's what I got for my first drive and I'll buy another one some day when I can get 2TB+ SSDs for under 150.

To the second one, get a laser printer. Inkjet is entirely a price fixing scam.
 
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some SSD's still today aren't protected from loosing data during a power loss event, especially the cheaper ones. This used to be an enterprise SSD feature that - slowly- creeps into consumer SSD's.

Originally Posted By: horse123


To the second one, get a laser printer. Inkjet is entirely a price fixing scam.


That used to be true, and mostly still is, but inkjet is getting cheaper these days, some HP and Epson are actually cheaper per page than lasers.
 
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Computers use switching power supplies to develop much lower +/- DC voltages. A brownout or sag on the 110v AC wall power will have little effect on a good PS. The lower AC voltage just means additional current will be pulled from the wall. Spikes are a different story.

The actual problems computers have is when voltage drops/sags on the +/- DC lines from the PS. And usually when it is pushed beyond its design output. Adding gaming or multiple video cards I would say is the quickest way to overload a PS but adding many mechanical disks can also get you there. There is also a degradation of the PS components like capacitors that can effect electronics over time.

Many people put little thought into a good power supply beyond what came in the box when new. They pop in a few upgrades and have all sorts of problems they cant seem to pin down. Always make sure you have adequate power supply for the hardware you have and replace the PS if you add more hardware and odd things start happening. An active UPS never hurts but wont help an overloaded PS.
 
Yeah, the better SSDs have capacitors that allow them to write all data to flash on a power failure. I remember an article a while ago about one manufacturer leaving that out to save money or improve performance. But then you stand a fair chance of corrupting the disk on a power failure.

I've had lots of power failures with my Intel SSDs and never had one corrupted. However, even they had a firmware bug a few years back that could corrupt the disk on a power outage. They fixed it pretty quickly, though.
 
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