SSD Drive Failures - Please Share Your Experiences

Discussion in 'hardware' started by TheKid7, Jan 31, 2013.

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  1. TheKid7

    TheKid7 Registered Member

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    Please share your experiences with SSD Drive Failures. What symptoms did you see? How did you figure out that the SSD Drive was failing or had failed? How long had the SSD Drive been in service when it failed?

    Thanks in Advance.
     
  2. nosirrah

    nosirrah Malware Fighter

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    I am personally responsible for installing 36 SSDs (SATA 150, 300 and 600) at this point between work systems, personal use and gifts and so far I have seen 1 failure.

    This was my little sister's Dell laptop and a OCZ Agility 2 SSD. The symptom is that post takes several minutes followed by an error message about no OS or bootable media found. In BIOS there is no drive listed. This laptop was in use for several hours every day for about 2 years.
     
  3. Fuzzfas

    Fuzzfas Registered Member

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    My first SSD (OCZ of course), came DOA. It simply wouldn't appear in UEFI. If you google around, you will find that OCZ had some major quality control issues.
     
  4. MarcP

    MarcP Registered Member

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    My OCZ Petrol was a PITA since the day I bought it (and yes, it has the latest firmware). It would randomly suddenly become undetectable by the system and then magically come back alive. Many times it would become completely unresponsive and the only way to bring it back was to do a full restore with Macrium Reflect.

    Eventually I had enough. Replaced it with a Crucial M4 and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

    Seems like OCZ is mentioned a lot in this thread.
     
  5. Fuzzfas

    Fuzzfas Registered Member

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    It's mentioned all over the internet, not just here. It's the most usual brand in "avoid like the plague" SSD topics. Many people (including me), got them because of their low price. But, well, there is a reason they have low price, as some unfortunates discovered later.

    At the end, i went with Kingston, smooth saling at low price.
     
  6. TheKid7

    TheKid7 Registered Member

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    I have been using a Crucial M4 128 GB SSD for about 9 months now. A few days ago I found that Windows would load fine until you just get past the login. Windows would not finish loading.

    I Restored an Image which was made about three weeks ago and the problem was still there. After Restoring the Image, NOD32 would get stuck in the Startup Scan.

    I used the Hard Drive Diagnostics which is included in Parted Magic and the hard drive Quick Test showed the SSD Drive to be OK.

    I ran a Scan with the Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10. The scan completed in a reasonable period of time and nothing was found. I figured that if the hard drive had a problem that the scan probably would not complete.

    It is easy to access the SSD Drive with many different bootable Linux Distro's.

    I am not sure if my Crucial M4 SSD is defective, but I am now suspicious of it. I switched back to a regular hard drive.
     
  7. Fuzzfas

    Fuzzfas Registered Member

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    @ TheKid7

    And Imagine that Crucial has a reputation for probably the highest quality SSD (manufacturing wise).

    Fact is, the SSD technology still isn't very mature. That's also why i prefer cheap ones.
     
  8. Bill_Bright

    Bill_Bright Registered Member

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    I agree though maybe more accurately, SSD technology has only just reached maturity but is still young. That is, SSD technologies have greatly improved over the last 5 years, and in the last 2 in particular - in terms of speed, reliability, durability, and price. But they still have a ways to go.

    One fact that is making SSDs a hard sell is the fact so much of our computing tasks are graphics oriented, and "network-centric" - meaning much of the data displayed on our monitors is downloaded from the Internet and NOT pulled from our hard drives. Couple that with the fact most computers today have gobs of RAM, minimizing the need for the OS and CPU to stuff temporary data in to the Page File on a slow drive.

    So replacing the hard drives with SSDs, for many users, offers little advantage - except faster boot times. And for folks like me who run days, or even several weeks without rebooting, boot times are pretty much immaterial.

    While SSD cost per gigabyte has dramatically dropped since they first came out, SSDs prices still need to come down significantly to be competitive with HD prices.

    Another problem for SSDs is their speeds are now bumping into the bandwidth barriers imposed by the limits of the SATA 3.0 (6 Gbit/s) drive interface.

    Here's a good read: Toms Hardware Best SSDs for the Money, January 2013.
     
  9. nosirrah

    nosirrah Malware Fighter

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    Only on the large consecutive reads/writes though, we have a long way to go before small random reads/writes max out and when it comes to how fast the OS/software feels, these small reads/writes really do matter a lot. This is in fact why many SSDs (even the 840 pro) come with ram cache, its to help the SSD deal with these problem operations.
     
  10. Bill_Bright

    Bill_Bright Registered Member

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    I agree. But as more and more systems are coming only with SSDs and no HDs, more and more users will bump into that bottleneck.

    That said, there are still several bigger (narrower?) bottlenecks to deal with - most notably, network broadband.
     
  11. Noob

    Noob Registered Member

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    If i ever get an SSD i'll make sure it is an Intel one, i feel like they are the best ones. :D
     
  12. Bill_Bright

    Bill_Bright Registered Member

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    Regardless if you get SSD or HD, Intel or Crucial, you still have to keep current backups.
     
  13. Noob

    Noob Registered Member

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    Yeah that's true.
    I'll get a second backup HDD soon, i can't keep most of my media files in only 1 HDD. :ninja:
     
  14. Bill_Bright

    Bill_Bright Registered Member

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    Well, fortunately, media files are served easily from slow (by comparison) hard drives so no need to waste money on SSDs for them. And really, unless you are the creative artist, media files can be replaced too.

    Tax records, contacts, email, and other "documents" (perhaps going back years) can be more devastating if lost. If you have nothing for a backup plan now, you are treading on thin ice.
     
  15. PaulyDefran

    PaulyDefran Registered Member

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    Gen I OCZ Vertex. In use about 2 years. Then failures loading apps on boot. Chkdsk would repair tons of stuff, to no avail...it would happen each boot. Wiping and re-installing Windows would throw errors - it wouldn't install. Kind of like errors you get with bad memory.

    Covered under warranty and replaced - replacement (same model) didn't last two weeks in a new build. Black screen on boot with a problem with a corrupted C:\Windows\Boot. Threw it out and will only buy Intel or Samsung from now on.

    I have a Vertex II and Vertex III in other boxes...I'm holding my breath.

    PD
     
  16. Noob

    Noob Registered Member

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    Hahahaha by media files i meant personal things such as images from my family/myself and HD Videos i recorded when i was overseas etc . . . Memories.
    I hope i never loose those files, i consider those very important. :D
     
  17. Krysis

    Krysis Registered Member

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    Not surprised! - I think the early OCZ SSDs had a dreadful reputation for reliability – before I migrated to an SSD, most of my searches on the net about SSDs in general revealed numerous issues with OCZs.

    Yet here in my country, we were probably slow on the uptake of SSDs (they were horrendously expensive here even 18 months ago) and the earlier OCZs never sold well - so OCZ SSDs never attained a bad reputation and in fact are now the benchmark for SSDs (Vertex 4)

    I have a 240GB Vertex 3 (sandforce controller) – never a blip and now going for nearly one year!
     
  18. Bill_Bright

    Bill_Bright Registered Member

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    Then you need to ensure you have several copies, stored in several locations - including off-site locations to ensure recovery in the invent your house burns down, flooded, destroyed by tornado or robbed.
     
  19. DVD+R

    DVD+R Registered Member

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    None! because I don't dick about with it, Install it leave it, end of.............
     
  20. Mrkvonic

    Mrkvonic Linux Systems Expert

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    No failures yet ... but then everything is possible.
    Mrk
     
  21. guest

    guest Guest

    First SSD was a Supertalent Ultradrive GX in autumn 2009. - Stopped working fine after one year. It got slower than it was in the beginning and one day I couldn't make a backup (it didn't finish). So I checked the SSD with some tool and it revealed it had a few bad (red) sectors. Those were the reason for not being able to make a backup. Also shortly after that the system would hang for many seconds once in a while and out of the blue. - I decided that wasn't reliable anymore and stopped using this model. - I could have gotten replaced it but I lost all trust in that product and just bought in autumn of 2010 a new SSD.

    This time it was (and is to this day) a Vertex 2 60 GB (3x nm, not 25). I updated it with every new firmware available and never had any problem.

    But wait .. one day it wouldn't boot (BIOS didn't recognize the SSD) but I remembered what to do: power off, disconnecting the SSD, waiting a minute and after that it worked flawlessly to this day. - According to Hard Disk Sentinel it has 1,81 TB lifetime writes so far.

    On another system a 3.5 inch Vertex 2 120 GB runs also without any problem (also 3x nm). - So I cannot say anything bad from my own experience about Vertex 2, besides that OCZ got in bed with Barefoot controller IIRC and I would never buy such a thing again after my first bad experience with Supertalent's product.
     
  22. Bill_Bright

    Bill_Bright Registered Member

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    That really does not make sense. Did you reboot after disconnecting, then connect and reboot again?

    I suspect something was corrupt and rebooting simply sorted that out. Sadly, there is no way of telling what was corrupt and if it was just a fluke, or a sign of things to come. :(
     
  23. guest

    guest Guest

    I knew that someone would say something, but yesterday I was to lazy to correct this. :D

    Of course I connected SSD (sata II, power) again, powered system up, checked in BIOS if SSD was available again (it was or I could choose it again) and from there all was fine. It's a "thing" that is quite common if you watch forum threads. Only because I read about it before (while others had to deal with it) I knew then what to do. - I hope now is all cleared up. :)

    It is as I said quite common that sometimes the SSD (talking about Vertex 2 here) is "forgotten" by BIOS ... you just have to know what to do then. I did. And since it happened only ONCE on my system that is no big problem.

    All is fine! - That was long ago and SSD is running great and very reliable! :cool: - Also I hope (!) that Hard Disk Sentinel would give a warning if something should begin to degrade later. - Let's not talk that into being a symptom. :D
     
  24. Bill_Bright

    Bill_Bright Registered Member

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    And I suspected you did too, but it is often a mistake to assume - especially when we have no real clue to a posters skill-set or experience so I try to avoid that to avoid sending someone down the wrong path.
     
  25. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    SSD is still an immature product. Needs 2-3 more years of development, without capacity/price point improvement.

    As soon as the industry sees a higher density chip they go ahead and use it. Except that higher density chips have shorter lifespans. As little as 700 writes per cell nowadays. And they massively over-provision to make up for that, thus consuming space and using more chip real estate that'd otherwise go to user capacity. Where's the end-gain for the user? There isn't any.

    Reminds me of the MHz race of the early 2000's. Intel had some parts of the Prescot going 10GHz. And had problems with burning up and excessively long pipeline. Remember that? This trend needs to stop before SSD engineering can get on the right path toward reliability and longevity.
     
    Last edited: Feb 22, 2013
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