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Death of an SSD - Symptoms

Dos_Box

By Dos_Box
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Dos_Box

Dos_Box

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Well, it had to happen eventually. My first ever SSD, a four year old Kingston 128GB SSD Now v series has finally bitten the dust. Being the first time I have had an SSD die on me I was quite struck by the way it did it compared to a traditional disk based drive.

There were no slowly developing errors when reading/writing and even the diagnostic utils I used on it reported that all was well.

The symptoms I had were that the drive would randomly not be detected, or disconnect whilst the PC was switched on. Being as it was attached to a new motherboard when this started to occur I was putting it down to loose power or SATA connections.

Finally it started to be down more than it was up and I got the data off there yesterday and pulled the drive.

I then put it in a laptop today, threw on Windows 7 and all was well. Until I came to switch it on about an hour ago. Once more the drive was missing and I got an 'Operating System Cannot be Found' error.

I just thought it may be helpful that if you have SSD's and have not yet had one fail on you that you aware of any potential symptoms you may encounter.

So, anyone else have any failures and random behavior they would can report?

mrbios

mrbios

Posted
Posted
I've had a couple of failures, OCZ though so kind of expected with their failure rates. Tends to be a case of one day the PC works, the next day the PC won't load the OS and doesn't detect the drive and that's about it. The issues i've seen so far tend to be either it works or it doesn't with no inbetween.
Dos_Box

Dos_Box

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With an SSD you should only get "works or doesnt work"

 

For many that have not yet had one fail it may come as a shock. At least with disk based drives you got some kind of warning. Frb funny noises to bad sectors and disk thrashing you could at least get data off a drive before doomsday.

It's fine at the moment with many using SSD's as boot drives and disks for storage, but in coming years with larger and larger SSD's coming onto the market at lower and lower prices I think the manufacturers should start to develop and fit early warning devices to them! An SSD version of SMART perhaps.

LosOjos

LosOjos

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Posted
Hmmm, I wonder what happens if the SSD part of a hybrid drive dies? You'd think it'd revert to acting like a standard HDD, but I don't actually know anyone who's had one long enough for it to fail to find out...
mac_shinobi

mac_shinobi

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Hmmm, I wonder what happens if the SSD part of a hybrid drive dies? You'd think it'd revert to acting like a standard HDD, but I don't actually know anyone who's had one long enough for it to fail to find out...

 

I was thinking that about either apples fusion drive or a seagate momentus xt ??

mrbios

mrbios

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Posted
Well that's put me off them e even more now!

Was considering one, but think I'll stick with traditional HDD's for now...

 

SSDs are less likely to fail than HDDs based on the same time periods. What are you worried about?

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mac_shinobi

mac_shinobi

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Too be fair it was a v series of ssd so prolly not a great choice of ssd and if it's a samsung 840 pro or similar you get 5 years warranty so as long as you store data on traditional drives you should be ok
LosOjos

LosOjos

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Posted
I was thinking that about either apples fusion drive or a seagate momentus xt ??

 

I can't find a definite answer on Google. Nothing official (that I can see), some saying it will stop working as the "path" from SATA to HDD will be broken, which sounds wrong to me, others saying it'll fall back to acting as a standard HDD with no data loss as all data cached on the SSD is mirrored on the HDD. I hope the latter is correct!

mac_shinobi

mac_shinobi

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I can't find a definite answer on Google. Nothing official (that I can see), some saying it will stop working as the "path" from SATA to HDD will be broken, which sounds wrong to me, others saying it'll fall back to acting as a standard HDD with no data loss as all data cached on the SSD is mirrored on the HDD. I hope the latter is correct!

 

I would have thought the latter as the flash / ssd is more a cache or buffer to read and write data quicker to the normal drive and is used for data that is accessed more frequently

 

Maybe a question for the manufacturer

mac_shinobi

mac_shinobi

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Posted
SSDs are less likely to fail than HDDs based on the same time periods. What are you worried about?

 

Am sure I read an article somewhere that basically said that the MTBF comparing normal hard drives to flash / SSD 's was the same or similar

Techie-v2

Techie-v2

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Well that's put me off them e even more now!

Was considering one, but think I'll stick with traditional HDD's for now...

 

But you have a backup if course so its only an inconvineance IF it fails, not a disaster. You should get a 3 or 5 year warranty on the drive just like traditional HDD so I dont really see an issue

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Arthur

Arthur

Posted
Posted (edited)
An SSD version of SMART perhaps.

:confused:

 

http://i.imgur.com/jFRi2sP.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/9Gp73U6.png

 

To be fair it was a V series of SSD so prolly not a great choice of SSD

+1 The first V Series SSDs from Kingston were rubbish to say the least.

 

My four year old Intel X25-M 'G2' is still working perfectly.

 

http://i.imgur.com/vDA7mxn.png

Edited by Arthur
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DMcCoy

DMcCoy

Posted
Posted
SSDs are less likely to fail than HDDs based on the same time periods. What are you worried about?

 

So they say, but for me they don't seem any better.

 

I booted, Windows was borked. I did a chkdsk. SSD was never seen again.

 

BTW, I assume we all know how long data can stay on a MLC flash drive *without power* don't we? I didn't realise it was so short!

sted

sted

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So they say, but for me they don't seem any better.

 

I booted, Windows was borked. I did a chkdsk. SSD was never seen again.

 

BTW, I assume we all know how long data can stay on a MLC flash drive *without power* don't we? I didn't realise it was so short!

 

not a clue so go on scare us lol

sted

sted

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1) Drive dissapearing entireley never to be seen again by bios or windows.

2) Random crashes that are unreproducable (i.e totally random)

 

That's what I've had in the past mostly with OCZ.

 

to be fair ive seen both of those with normal hdd's as well

Arthur

Arthur

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Posted
That's what I've had in the past mostly with OCZ.

That's what you get for buying OCZ SSDs. Drives from reputable manufacturers do not have these issues.

Dos_Box

Dos_Box

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:confused:

 

http://i.imgur.com/jFRi2sP.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/9Gp73U6.png

 

 

+1 The first V Series SSDs from Kingston were rubbish to say the least.

 

My four year old Intel X25-M 'G2' is still working perfectly.

 

http://i.imgur.com/vDA7mxn.png

 

 

I think however the problem my drive (as with many others I've read about) is that it didn't seem to be the actual data storage side of things that failed or degraded, but rather the controller. I'm just wondering whether it would be practical to develop a 'whole drive' sensor and monitoring package rather than just the read/write and uptime based stats. It does seem that with disk based drives you can get important data back upon failure, but with SSD's you may have almost zero chance of it (dependent on failure type) and any kind of early warning would be of benefit to end users.

beany1

beany1

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Posted

I had problems with a 6 month old OCZ SSD - would randomly turn off/vanish causing the pc to bluescreen - when restarted didn't show up in BIOS and had to shutdown and turn back on for the drive to appear. Requested an RMA, they told me they wouldn't replace until I'd done a firmware update followed by a secure erase.

 

Firmware was up-to-date, so I did the secure erase using their software. After this it's worked constantly for 6 more months without an issue....

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