sjb Posted February 24, 2016 Posted February 24, 2016 I installed Windows 10 on 31 computers in our ICT suite in the summer holidays, all 2 years old and working well. Since then 7 hard drives have failed. I also recently installed Windows 10 on on of our office machines a few weeks ago, 12 months old and never had any problems, and the hard drive on that has now failed too. Thankfully they are still all under warranty, but I am concerned that it may be more than bad luck as I have never had this problem with any of our PCs running Windows 7. Also if you Google Window 10 and hard drive failure a lot of similar stories pop up. I'm don't understand how software can cause hardware failure on this scale, but I'd be interested to find out if any other schools have had similar issues. We can't afford to keep replacing hard drives at this rate once the warranties expire!
3s-gtech Posted February 24, 2016 Posted February 24, 2016 Would be interesting to know if this also affects SSDs. Not seen any issues on personal machines yet.
sjb Posted February 24, 2016 Author Posted February 24, 2016 Sorry - should have said that the 7 failed ICT suite machines are all SSDs. Office was a hard drive.
DanHamilton Posted February 24, 2016 Posted February 24, 2016 We had 38 Patriot (Torch) Drives die, not from Windows 10 but shortly after being built with Windows 7. We have used lots of Sandisks & Kingston drives in the last 6 months that have had 0 issues. A lot of hard work later and we have replaced all Patriot drives for Sandisks + Kingston SSD's again. Patriot's out the window and money back in pockets.
JRowley Posted February 25, 2016 Posted February 25, 2016 Did you upgrade or start from scratch? I only ask because I had an issue with a machine I upgraded where thousands of folders were being made in the root of any disc put into the machine to the point where I had 250k+ folders in the root of C and it was hammering the disc all day long. I could never find a solution so I formatted the machine and installed 10 from scratch and the problem has never come back. It's probably not related but thought I would share in the off chance you have seen something similar.
Michael Posted February 25, 2016 Posted February 25, 2016 I just think it's pure bad luck to be honest. Odds are you bought the SSDs or PCs themselves in a batch and the unrelated Office PC again could just be a co-incidence.
GuyJD Posted February 25, 2016 Posted February 25, 2016 I've been doing a rolling upgrade of our PCs to windows 10 since July 2015 and I haven't had any HDDs fail yet, don't have any SSD's here though.
mavhc Posted February 25, 2016 Posted February 25, 2016 The more full the ssd drive is the more problems it may have, some old drives with bad firmware broke completely, an upgrade will use up quite a bit more space. Or it's just a coincidence
disk Posted February 25, 2016 Posted February 25, 2016 Have you updated the firmware on those SSDs? We haven't had any issues with our Windows 10 deployed PCs. I wouldn't put too much stock in those search results. There is too much guessing. People are quick to blame one piece of hardware or software when actually they performed little to no troubleshooting. Some of them could have been running disk defrag utilities too not knowing they are unnecessary (and potentially harmful) for SSDs. Anyway, I think you can use the Kingston SSD Toolbox to check for/update firmware as well as see the drive health info. Kingston SSD Toolbox
sjb Posted February 25, 2016 Author Posted February 25, 2016 They were all upgraded from Windows 7, so this might be something to look at. Some of the failed SSDs were in units that were overheating to the point that they were too hot to touch. I will try clean installs to see if it helps.
Arthur Posted February 26, 2016 Posted February 26, 2016 Some of the failed SSDs were in units that were overheating to the point that they were too hot to touch. I don't think the heat has helped. 2.5" SSDs shouldn't get that hot.
synaesthesia Posted February 26, 2016 Posted February 26, 2016 Yes, they can, @AjitK29 . The way an OS reads/writes a file system can certainly exacerbate/catalyse failure rates in drives. See the old Deathstars for instance. They were absolutely BULLETPROOF in all but Windows systems - even Linux reading windows file systems didn't cause failures the way they did.
mavhc Posted February 26, 2016 Posted February 26, 2016 If the hardware relies on drivers to be correctly written to not die, then OSes can kill hardware.
Javik Posted March 2, 2016 Posted March 2, 2016 All the internal stuff that affects SSD life such as cell wearout and block erasure are basically hidden from view, so it's nearly impossible to find out how a SSD fails. The SSD manufacturers seem to want to keep all their internal operations secreted away from view. Clearly an SSD must do some sort of internal operational lifespan logging to keep track of cell failure rates and block erasures as the drive is used, but I know of no way to access that logging.
mavhc Posted March 2, 2016 Posted March 2, 2016 The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report - Page 1 and previous articles talk about the SMART parameters to monitor 1
yessum Posted March 22, 2017 Posted March 22, 2017 well, from my reading over the years on SSD, every single read/write operation actually degrades the drive. This may explain many things. Pertaining to windows 10, look into superfetch and a few other services, and you will find the DISK operations in 8 and 10 are constant and can go upwards up to 100% constantly. This makes a machine feel like it has a virus like older days when it was your processor at 80 90 100% and all your memory being used up due to spyware and viruses. But now, it's not a virus, it's windows 8 and 10 with the notorious disk usage, though IMHO windows 10 is the ultimate spyware software now. lol. now of course since windows 10 believes it is constantly optimizing your drives, is this good for SSD? We hear many yes/no on the internet don't we?
mavhc Posted March 23, 2017 Posted March 23, 2017 On Windows 10 Optimise Drives for SSD runs trim, not defrag, no issue there. Simple to test SSD wear anyway, install GSmartControl https://chocolatey.org/packages/gsmartcontrol , check the Wear Leveling Count, or similar, mine's at 93%, so 7% worn, with 4774 hours on time, that's 200 days if it's on 24/7, or about 3 years of actual use
zag Posted March 23, 2017 Posted March 23, 2017 Kingston Hyper X Thats your issue then! Kingston is like a tesco value SSD. Horrible reliability. Use Intel, and only Intel with SSDs.
Arthur Posted March 23, 2017 Posted March 23, 2017 I haven't had any problems with Samsung SSDs. We have over 180 now and not a single one has died. Use Intel, and only Intel with SSDs. What about the Intel SSDs that use third-party controllers? e.g. 600p = Silicon Motion.
Arthur Posted March 23, 2017 Posted March 23, 2017 every single read/write operation actually degrades the drive. How would a read operation degrade the drive? No data is being modified?
JRowley Posted March 23, 2017 Posted March 23, 2017 Samsung SSDs are very reliable, good warranty too.
mavhc Posted March 23, 2017 Posted March 23, 2017 I've got about 200 samsungs, about 3 dead after 4 years
Snoochieboochies Posted March 23, 2017 Posted March 23, 2017 I had an issue on a Win8 laptop a while ago where the HDD activity was maxed out at 100% permenantly. Not sure if it's the same issue, but might be worth checking as this would obviously shorten the life span of the drive.
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