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General discussion

Poll: Has your SSD drive ever failed before?

Nov 14, 2014 9:30AM PST

Discussion is locked

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One failure; had to reinstall OS and all programs
Nov 14, 2014 11:09AM PST

It happened about a year ago. It was a Crucial, well known for their stability and quality control, too. They suggested at first that it could have experienced power levels outside of its parameters and shut itself down, and suggested I try several cycles of steady power followed by shutting off. But, this failed to have any effect. They ended up replacing it under warranty at no cost other than mailing them the old, dead drive. (The new drive has not had problems.)

Since I could never get it to boot up, I could neither purge its contents nor retrieve them. Since I am already in the habit of multiple backups including cloud storage of all new files and periodic archiving, I did not lose any information that could not be replaced. I just had the tedious chore of re-installing the OS and each individual program, including calling Adobe about two programs that had to be activated over again, since I did not de-activate the lost installations. For that reason, I am adding periodic OS drive backups as well.

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Hasn't failed yet, but I'm ready
Nov 14, 2014 6:02PM PST

I use an SSD as the boot drive in my desktop machine, and I love the speed it gives to Windows and my applications; I save data onto conventional HDDs. If the SSD dies I won't lose much, since I can always reinstall Windows and application programs from their original installation discs -- but that's a time-consuming pain, and then I still have to reconfigure all the software settings to my preferences. So I use multiple backup strategies, including a NAS in RAID1, a cloud-service and an alternating pair of external HDD clones for the boot drive -- one is always completely up to date, while the other is a slightly older backup that may not have the most recent software updates.

Of course, I have never actually had a drive failure in my thirty-or-so years of using computers; I've always upgraded to larger drives, or to new entire computers, before they had a chance to die. But with the enormous capacities of both SSDs and HDDs today, I may not need to upgrade my storage again before one or more of my current drives fail.

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I've had mine for three years now
Nov 15, 2014 12:10AM PST

I installed an OCZ 128GB drive for my system and applications about three years ago (I keep my data on MUCH larger-capacity HDDs). I have monitored its health using the freeware Open Hardware Monitor since I first installed it. I hit it VERY hard, as some high-data-write applications I use nearly constantly write their temp files there.

For more than a year and a half, it remained perfect - 100.0% - according to the "Life Remaining" indicator shown in Open Hardware Monitor. Then I lost one percent, and about 8 months later dropped another percent. Just last week I lost another percent.

Now, these are built with excess capacity to compensate for when one of the NANDs fail, and the drive remains pretty healthy, but the increasing frequency of the losses are becoming a concern. I believe I will be replacing it within the next few months, which is not really a problem. The prices have fallen so drastically that I can get a TB drive for what this 128GB cost me when I got it (I think, however, I'll go with a 240GB.

But they go to read-only when they fail, and so the data should not be lost even if I procrastinate and leave it in for a little too long. One thing for sure, though: The performance advantage is so startling that I will never go back to running my system and apps off an HDD. I boot up Win 8.1 from stone cold in about seven seconds.