SSD warning - keep your data backed up!

Since 2009 I've had about 10 SSD's, of those 5 have either failed completely or suddenly lost data, the makes involved were Kingston, Crucial and even Samsung. Most reliable were Samsung Pro's or Samsung 830's.

In comparison had however maybe 50+ HDD's, and only 1 HDD ever failed.

It's true hardware can fail at any moment, however I've been involved with computers many many years, and my last hardware to fail (other then an SSD) was an Abit motherboard running a Celeron 3! The issue rate on my SSD's is by far abnormally high, and yes I have a house full of computers, I even have a home server room, and those SSD's gave issues on different machines.
 
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I was being lazy when I seen this thread but here goes.

Has a few Mech HDD's go bad but never lost DATA.

This was years ago so not as clued up as I am now and would have been Windows XP era.

Few with bad sectors so Windows will not boot as they were at start of HDD, so install Windows to another HDD and get my filed from the bad none bootable HDD by browsing to it.

A newish Maxtor's Read/Write Cache chip died, my PC took ages to boot and to do an anything like open programs esp. read/write large video files, I was at a loss trying to work out what was wrong till I loaded up Sandra Si and it told me what was wrong.

My first WD My book before they put 6k rpm Greens inside it was a 7.2k rpm Caviar Black and they ran hot in that caddy, after about 1 year it finally started to stutter for a few days and then froze with a lot of DATA on it and it was my backup and this was when I had just reinstalling Windows the previous day so I had not moved the backup back to the Windows drive.

I came up with an idea (confirmed by Google) that electronics and metal discs make work better when cold so I put it in the freezer (inside Ziploc bag with silica gel) for 24 hours and that let me get all my DATA back, as soon as it heat up too much it froze again so it took 2 sessions.
 
I've never had any Samsung to fail on me, though I heard story from my friend getting the dreadful 8MB brick on his Intel SSD.

My main NAS is still running on 8x 6TB WD RED mechanical drives in Raid 6, though I'm considering moving to only a bunch of Samsung QVO 4TB drives for Raid 5.
 
At my former work (school) we had a bunch of Samsung 840 120gb die in a fairly consistent manner, losing OS, reimage, work for a month or two then hang BIOS totally dead (we just reimaged with the expectation it would die soon as no data was stored locally). About 19 of about 62 PCs bought a few years earlier. Guessing all the pcs followed a similar pattern of use as they were spread over 2 Learning resource rooms.

Me personally i've had quite a few OCZ die, especially Vertex 2 with the red light bricking. Though this may be due to the fact OCZ had the SSD monopoly for quite some time and i purchased a lot. Still have a Vertex LE 50GB in a 2003 Server and Agility 3 120gb in a laptop that works. probably have a few vertex 1,2,3,4 somewhere stored that still work.
 
Justintime said:
At my former work (school) we had a bunch of Samsung 840 120gb die in a fairly consistent manner, losing OS, reimage, work for a month or two then hang BIOS totally dead (we just reimaged with the expectation it would die soon as no data was stored locally). About 19 of about 62 PCs bought a few years earlier. Guessing all the pcs followed a similar pattern of use as they were spread over 2 Learning resource rooms.

Me personally i've had quite a few OCZ die, especially Vertex 2 with the red light bricking. Though this may be due to the fact OCZ had the SSD monopoly for quite some time and i purchased a lot. Still have a Vertex LE 50GB in a 2003 Server and Agility 3 120gb in a laptop that works. probably have a few vertex 1,2,3,4 somewhere stored that still work.
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840 was planar TLC drive and those tiny transistors struggled to hold 16 charge states without data retention going to hell.
And once errors hit drive's internal "bookkeeping"/control data, SSDs basically instant brick themselves.

OCZ again made multiple lines of super crappy SSDs.
Some central European hardware site once did some component failure/return rate articles and those Vertex drives were on different planet compared to rest.
They were basically SSD equivalent to Fuhjyyu capped Antec Smart/TrueBomb PSUs of 15 years ago.
 
I had a Crucial drive fail once, completely vanished like yours yet still in use today after I found a way to force a 'self repair' of the drive.

Really simple. PC off and disconnect the sata data cable but LEAVE POWER CONNECTED. Switch your PC on and leave it at the boot error message/bios screen for at least an hour (longer possibly better). Switch back off and connect the data cable, voila !. My drive did an internal tidy/fix if powered on but no data connection detected !, give it a go...
 
EsaT said:
840 was planar TLC drive and those tiny transistors struggled to hold 16 charge states without data retention going to hell.
And once errors hit drive's internal "bookkeeping"/control data, SSDs basically instant brick themselves.

OCZ again made multiple lines of super crappy SSDs.
Some central European hardware site once did some component failure/return rate articles and those Vertex drives were on different planet compared to rest.
They were basically SSD equivalent to Fuhjyyu capped Antec Smart/TrueBomb PSUs of 15 years ago.
Click to expand...

heh, my first SSD was a vertex drive from OCZ, it bricked itself after 2 months of normal casual use in a gaming rig. Talk about being a **** product.

EDIT: I just looked at my purchase order from back then for the drive and it wasn't a vertex but a OCZ Vector. Still **** though :p
 
Phixsator said:
heh, my first SSD was a vertex drive from OCZ, it bricked itself after 2 months of normal casual use in a gaming rig. Talk about being a **** product.

EDIT: I just looked at my purchase order from back then for the drive and it wasn't a vertex but a OCZ Vector. Still **** though :p
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Could have been worse.
One friend (whose computer hobby started before popularity of x86 PCs) had failing drives somehow damaging motherboard's SATA ports.
After second OCZ dying and another SATA port following it out he didn't anymore use third drive gotten from warranty.
 
EsaT said:
Could have been worse.
One friend (whose computer hobby started before popularity of x86 PCs) had failing drives somehow damaging motherboard's SATA ports.
After second OCZ dying and another SATA port following it out he didn't anymore use third drive gotten from warranty.
Click to expand...

Jeezus, havent heard of a drive taking out ports on a board before.
 
Phixsator said:
Jeezus, havent heard of a drive taking out ports on a board before.
Click to expand...
Seems like everything is possible.
He was updating HDD equipped market PC to use SSD for OS.
It worked some time until suddenly SSD wasn't recognized properly/stopped working completely.
Putting HDD back PC started again working until little later that SATA port stopped working.
With HDD moved to another port everything worked again.
Also new SSD gotten from warranty worked for some time, until IIRC pretty much same repeated.
 
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