SSD warning - keep your data backed up!

darael · 30 Mar 2020 at 10:04

Woke this morning to one of my PC's dead and wouldn't boot up. Entered BIOS and the Samsung 840 EVO isn't showing in the BIOS or any other PC or laptop I try it in - it just causes the BIOS to hang for a few seconds longer.

Luckily I keep fairly regular backups, so not a great deal was lost, other than extra cups of tea and a few curses as I have to buy another SSD. But others might not be so lucky and this definitely made me think twice about SSD drives.

So SSDs with no moving parts can still die. Keep regular backups!

mattyg · 30 Mar 2020 at 10:17

darael said:
Woke this morning to one of my PC's dead and wouldn't boot up. Entered BIOS and the Samsung 840 EVO isn't showing in the BIOS or any other PC or laptop I try it in - it just causes the BIOS to hang for a few seconds longer.

Luckily I keep fairly regular backups, so not a great deal was lost, other than extra cups of tea and a few curses as I have to buy another SSD. But others might not be so lucky and this definitely made me think twice about SSD drives.

So SSDs with no parts can still die. Keep regular backups!

No parts??

Thats the problem.

tonys · 30 Mar 2020 at 10:24

All electronics can fail.

Trig · 30 Mar 2020 at 10:31

I had a failure a long time ago using an OCZ drive, they were good on the RMA/Warranty side of things but where on a spinner you get warnings, be it a slower boot, noise or something else, with an SSD you get a happy PC, then a dead PC in very quick succession.

darael · 30 Mar 2020 at 10:37

mattyg said:
No parts??

Thats the problem.

I meant moving parts, oops! Fixing OP now.

ChrisLX200 · 30 Mar 2020 at 10:46

Trig said:
I had a failure a long time ago using an OCZ drive, they were good on the RMA/Warranty side of things but where on a spinner you get warnings, be it a slower boot, noise or something else, with an SSD you get a happy PC, then a dead PC in very quick succession.

Never had a HDD control board fail then? I've had a couple.. But yes, they can all die. Got a white board covered in the magnets extracted from deceased hard drives :-)

Trig · 30 Mar 2020 at 14:02

ChrisLX200 said:
Never had a HDD control board fail then? I've had a couple.. But yes, they can all die. Got a white board covered in the magnets extracted from deceased hard drives

Not that I can remember, maybe I'm just lucky, or you're older than me..

darael · 30 Mar 2020 at 16:54

Well the drive isn't showing up anywhere, including the BIOS. Luckily there wasn't too much important on it, but it's still frustrating when something dies for no reason.

At least spinning rust usually gives you a bit of warning before dying.

EsaT · 30 Mar 2020 at 16:59

tonys said:
All ~~electronics~~ can fail.

Now it's correct.

Maundie · 30 Mar 2020 at 17:58

All components can fail, I think everyone who browses these forums has a data backup, if not you only lose it once.

Had plenty of Hdds fail but never a SSD luckily I've always had backups.

Phil2008 · 1 Apr 2020 at 14:27

I dont think my samsung 120gb sdd is that healthy because sometimes windows bluescreens when restarting or shutting down and I think its down to the ssd. But I also have the drive backed up, so its not a big deal is it fails

Dave Burton · 1 Apr 2020 at 23:03

Trig said:
I had a failure a long time ago using an OCZ drive, they were good on the RMA/Warranty side of things but where on a spinner you get warnings, be it a slower boot, noise or something else, with an SSD you get a happy PC, then a dead PC in very quick succession.

I also had an OCZ drive fail, it was either Christmas Ever or boxing day about two years back, same issue as OP dead PC, no drive in bios. Worst time of year for delivieries, but blinking FAB for pricing!!!

james.miller · 1 Apr 2020 at 23:08

Maundie said:
I think everyone who browses these forums has a data backup

Don't ever bet on that.

Cyber-Mav · 2 Apr 2020 at 09:25

you guys will be surprised at the number of machines with ssd's iv seen that run the original out of box firmware. a lot of ssd's had issues that firmware updates fixed. some like crucial drives even had a failure after being on for a certain amount of hours.
these days i buy enterprise ssd's but as always its good to backup data. an os can easily be reinstalled. imaging with tools like acronis are super simple and quick.

Trig · 2 Apr 2020 at 10:46

Or the Veeam stuff, I used that before, its pretty simple.

EsaT · 2 Apr 2020 at 12:46

Cyber-Mav said:
these days i buy enterprise ssd's

Good thing HPE had pile of SSDs with "this drive self destructs after xxx hour" feature.

At least Seagate HDDs with self bricking firmware were recoverable, while SSDs are better...

Deleted member 77746 · 2 Apr 2020 at 13:10

All hardware can fail at any moment.

EsaT · 2 Apr 2020 at 13:17

mrbell1984 said:
All hardware ~~can fail at any moment.~~

... is waiting to fail at any moment.
Some just reach that moment sooner than others.

Cyber-Mav · 2 Apr 2020 at 22:28

Thats the interesting part. A lot of ssds had a pre programmed failure date based on hours used. I bet that was intentional but someone forgot to put a 0 on the end and failures were happening too soon.
In theory an ssd should last considerably longer than a hdd. In reality it doesnt seem to be the case.

andy_mk3 · 2 Apr 2020 at 22:37

You never know with SSD's. I've only ever had one fail, but it does still work, just causes the system to crash occasionally.

I have a cheap 500GB Sandisk drive in my server as a cache drive, it's now showing 106.77 Terabytes written to it, so I think it's done well.

On the backup side of things, I have a server where important stuff is copied which has parity protection, and I run Duplicati in docker to upload it all to Gdrive.