The solid state drive on my personal laptop just died.
Here’s the story. I have a DELL XPS laptop which is now 2.5 years old. The laptop had demonstrated no issues. About 6 months ago, I decided to upgrade the hard drive to solid state drive. There was a lot of hype in the market for SSD and it seemed that everybody is praising it. After thinking about it, I finally chose to upgrade my personal laptop by purchasing SSD it with Rs. 15,000 (~USD 320). The SSD that I bought contains 120 GB and supports TRIM as well.
For six months, the SSD worked marvelously. It did what it was supposed to do. It was doing everything in a super fast rate that was why I felt extremely pleased. I always shut down my machine as turning on the computer with SSD took less than 10 seconds for me. I was very glad because the power consumption was reduced and my computer’s noise became smaller as well. I used stabilizer and UPS in my home, at the place where I plugin my laptop and systems.
One fine morning, I tried to use the machine. To my surprise, it did not boot up and constantly showed me, “HDD does not exist”. I did all the tricks I know and have read in the book to make sure that HDD comes back. I even put it in another machine; it did not work there, too. Finally I dug my old box and found my original HDD of Dell machine. As soon as I put it back, it worked out very well.
So my SSD is now dead for less than 6 months now. I actually spent my whole day to re-install my computer on regular hard drives.
I have lost my complete interest in the SSD because all my life I have never lost any hard drive but this. I still have hard drives that are more than 10 years old, but despite their age they are working fine unlike this one which had been in use for only 6 months. Until now, I do not understand why my SSD died so quickly. I tried to contact the original manufacturer for replacement; unfortunately I got no reply from them. I think I lost my money, some data and my trust in SSD.
Because this was a personal laptop I had not configured any RAID on it. It is totally possible that this is a single incident and an accident, but again, it has happened to me. I would like to share this experience with all who are planning to use SSD in their production environment. I am not going to believe that SSD are ready for production till I have a personally good experience with them.
Just a word of advice: Be careful when you use SSD.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
28 Comments. Leave new
Found this while googling ssd sudden deaths, as I just experienced the same thing. 6 months too, eerily enough, under normal college student usage. Lucikly I had just done a backup so that wasn’t so bad. I have got a replacement ssd but i’m a lot more wary of it now. Have a scorpio black 500gb ready just in case.
It happened to me in 5 days of use. And happened to my neighbour also after 5 days of use. In both cases the system could not recognize any HDD.
I insisted to get a replacement and because of the 5 days only I got one. Now I am doing very regular backups…
Following up my report on June 13, Computer Planet replaced the twin OCZ Vertax SATA-II 120MB SSD’s in RAID mirror configuration. I had no further problem until a week ago when instead of booting up in seconds, it was taking minutes, with the message RAID 2 degraded. Whatever the theory might be that they should be more relable than HDD’s, the fact is that three out of the four SSD drives I have used this year have failed within a few months of use. On a wider point, it’s not backup data recovery which is the hassle, it’s all the software which has to be re-installed and registered. SSD’s are delightfully fast, but that advantage is completely outweighed by their unreliability.
I used computer since intel 386DX , I used some HDD so good and some HDD was bad after a few months or more than 1 year of use . First my SSD is ata 2.5 Transcend ( run good , fast boot ) . Second SSD ( OCZ vertex 2 ) upgraded for ( Fujitsu Lifebook ) Boot WinXP and run ok but it cant wake up after system stanby ,after that windows error , I must re setup windows and it still error after system standby .3th SSD ( Crucial M4) run very good in Fujitsu Lifebook ,I very happy . 4th SSD ( another Crucial M4) upgrade my PC ( AMD phenom II ) it was die after 3th times ghost not sucess , I am very sad .5th SSD(Kingston V+100 ) run ok in my laptop and PC ( but i not happy) . Finally ,I use Trancend SSD in my CF-R4 panasonic , Crucial M4 in my Fujitsu , WD Velocraptor on Desktop (PC) ,Kingstons V+100 is spare SSD . OCZ return to suply ( I did not buy )
I am still not convinced about SSD drives. Had two different SSD drives fail in a HP Elitebook 8440p. One failed a couple days after the 1yr warranty, the replacement drive failed 42 days after installation.
Both failures were sudden and complete. Tried using drive recovery services and they could not restore any data.
I have had two die in a Dell Latitude D520, neither one lasted more than sixty days.
Scott
I think the following link is interesting not only because it shows how fast SSD’s are and because it mentions that you should mirror them for redundancy but because it also shows how people are starting to accept SSD’s in production environments (after thorough testing).
A friend of mine is also running SSD’s on a very prominent and well known web site for finding holiday deals with much success. I think he’s only using it for tempdb though.
I’ve just lost all my data on my SSD disk. And this is not the first time. I’ve lost other three SSD drives. I’m disapointed and I’ll never use a new SSD disk in my life. Let’s back to HDD Drives.