Warning regarding SSD's and catastrophic failures..

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Steve France
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Hi,

New to digital photography I am... but 35+ years of building and maintaining PC's I have...

I run my own computer business and have of late been very alarmed at the number of SSD's failing without warning

Normal Hard disks tend to deteriorate over time and failures are mostly gradual, SSD's tend to fail without warning !

Data can often be recovered relatively easily from Normal disks and even if specialist help is required it is generally successful if a bit expensive

SSD's however seem to die completely requiring specialist help, which from my experience is not that successful and very expensive - for example a recent 120Gb SSD had a 60% success for a whooping £900 !

So my warning is, if your using SSD's (particularly M.2,) then ensure good backups to spinning disks, too many of my customers have discovered this to there cost !
 
So my warning is, if your using SSD's (particularly M.2,) then ensure good backups to spinning disks, too many of my customers have discovered this to there cost !
Excellent advice but I wonder how many will heed it.

I started in IT when 10MB was a big hard disk, physically the size of a refrigerator. I learnt early on that the only way to secure data was by making multiple backups, cycling them regularly and storing them off site. These days, I have at least three copies of everything important plus archives. It may seem a little bit anal but I've seen some shocking disasters over the years. Remember, hard disks can fail as well, so only one backup is never enough.

For those of a nostalgic turn of mind: one of the early "portable" computers...

Olivetti M21 luggable computer Nikon F 1991 59-07.jpg
 
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Ha,

I wrote my first stock control program on one of those, CPM (I think) and twin floppies...

But I started with a NASCOM 1 - which arrived as discrete chips and board, you had to put together yourself. 16K memory, storage on audio cassette and program in machine code !

How things have changed !
 
It seems SSD technology results in catastrophic failures, not any particular brands but you must remember there are only a few memory chip manufacturers but far more assemblers.

The last was PNY - ironically still under warranty BUT that does not include data recovery !

I tend to only use WD and Crucial personally !
 
But I started with a NASCOM 1 - which arrived as discrete chips and board, you had to put together yourself. 16K memory, storage on audio cassette and program in machine code !
Aha! One of those Intel/Zilog blokes. ;) I started with an Acorn 6502 system 1 built on Eurocards, so I could put the whole thing in my jacket pocket with the power brick in the other. 256 bytes on board and not a video interface in sight. The OS on the Ollivetti was generally MSDOS but that one is running BOS for which I did a lot of programming at one time.
 
I understand that the life of an SSD is typically much the same as an HDD. I do not have an SSD at this time because I was concerned for their reliability but have been convinced that they should last at least 6 years. I am not clear whether you are suggesting that SSD's are much less reliable or your concern is just the way they fail. If it is the latter, I would not be too concerned as I keep image backups so could readily recover with a replacement disk. I started in IT before personal computers were invented but the first PC I owned was an Acorn, The O/S was on ROM so boot up was almost instantaneous unlike to 15 mins I have to wait now. I still have an Acorn RiscPC in my loft which was the fastest desktop in the world in its day.

Dave
 
It seems SSD technology results in catastrophic failures, not any particular brands but you must remember there are only a few memory chip manufacturers but far more assemblers.

The last was PNY - ironically still under warranty BUT that does not include data recovery !

I tend to only use WD and Crucial personally !
I was aware that SSD failure will be total, just interested whether specific brands had problems. Personally use Samsung, Crucial and SanDisk.
 
I've had 5 x Sandisk SSD's and 1 failure ... as above, there one minute, gone the next.
Replacement (under warranty) is still going strong and the data was restored from an Acronis image so I was quickly back up and running.
 
Sorry, to be clear SSD's are as reliable as normal hard disks in my experience (probably sold 1000's) its the manner of there failure that concerns me and the dire consequences of failure
 
Hard drives are mechanical devices, SSD's are basically a big lump of silicon.
It's understandable that a SSD will fail completely as there are no moving parts.
Luckily I've yet to experience this with a SSD.
 
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Purchase two new identical PCs from a local PC builder (my specs) and one SSD failed after a few months....both replaced plus all others from that particular manufacturers batch.
This was about 6 years ago and I don't remember the manufacturer...….except that it was a recognised mainstream brand.
Luckily both 'home' PCs and I have always taken disk images every month.

PS. Both PCs still running well!
 
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I wonder what the influencing factors of failure are apart from 'wear & tear'?

By that I mean ~ in my home built PC I always ensure the HDD cage has room air blowing over them.....................having now added two SSD, I placed them in the floppy disk cage (does anyone still need or use floppies?) and though not forced air in the case of the HDDs they are spaced apart and there is in PC construction terms plenty of space around them.

So, in the case of SSD is it different environmental factors depending on the type of PC (or Mac) they are in?

In a desktop PC barring an earthquake there is in normal usage no heavy physical jarring shocks but in laptops G force shocks maybe has a cumulative 'impact'? Plus in the laptop, maybe thermal stress has some effect....................especially as Steve mentioned the .m2 type SSD and that I understand runs very hot compared to a standard SSD?
 
It's been said many times before here & elsewhere, you must assume any form of storage media used by a computer is about to fail; You should ensure you have a backup regime in place for any data you care about. The backup regime should ensure at least two copies of your important data is stored, preferably in different locations. Data on the backup devices must be refreshed periodically as they could fail at any time themselves.
 
I wonder what the influencing factors of failure are apart from 'wear & tear'?

By that I mean ~ in my home built PC I always ensure the HDD cage has room air blowing over them.....................having now added two SSD, I placed them in the floppy disk cage (does anyone still need or use floppies?) and though not forced air in the case of the HDDs they are spaced apart and there is in PC construction terms plenty of space around them.

So, in the case of SSD is it different environmental factors depending on the type of PC (or Mac) they are in?

In a desktop PC barring an earthquake there is in normal usage no heavy physical jarring shocks but in laptops G force shocks maybe has a cumulative 'impact'? Plus in the laptop, maybe thermal stress has some effect....................especially as Steve mentioned the .m2 type SSD and that I understand runs very hot compared to a standard SSD?
Electronics doesn't like stress, either physical or thermal. Turning PCs off and allowing them to cool down, followed by turning them on and heating up causes component stress.

When I worked with mainframes many years ago we used to hate the infrequent power shutdowns as we knew that powering everything back on from cold would result in 'something' not coming back up afterwards. When I ran a school PC network in later years we never shut our servers or networking switches down for the same reason.
 
Electronics doesn't like stress, either physical or thermal. Turning PCs off and allowing them to cool down, followed by turning them on and heating up causes component stress.

When I worked with mainframes many years ago we used to hate the infrequent power shutdowns as we knew that powering everything back on from cold would result in 'something' not coming back up afterwards. When I ran a school PC network in later years we never shut our servers or networking switches down for the same reason.

Good points! I have to admit I do shutdown the PC at the end of every day. But the Router, NAS and switch stay powered up 24/7 unless we are away on holiday................then I power everything down.

PS as for thermal ~ in the early 70's the hospital I worked at (in pathology) was one of the first, if not the very first, to buy a computer system. The computing hall was a large airconditioned room with both barrel drives and Winchester drives. The gear was all AFAIK second hand DEC including the smaller one (still the size of 5 four drawer filing cabinets) in the path lab itself but that also was linked the drives storage in the main suite. The A/C had numerous repeat issues and the barrel drives often had head crashes resulting in a stream of calls to the labs by the ward staff/doctors complaining that they could not access the patient lab results!
 
The lack of warning with SSDs, before they fail, can catch you out. I had one in an iMac go pop, which was annoying. Wasn't fully 'backed up', although all the important files were fine. That's the only SSD failure I've had so far, mind. Had a few HDDs fail over the years, but given the amount of time put through them, not a big deal tbh. The worst was 2 HDDs failing within a few days of each other; one was a boot drive, the other was for storage in a RAID 0 pair. TBH that was more of a pain to recover than anything. Ended up sticking it in an external caddy, and copying everything manually, to a new RAID 0 pair. Needed more storage anyway.

My biggest concern with files, is that future software may not allow access to them. Got a fair few older bits and pieces from my Mac OS9 days, that are no longer readable (on CDs and Zip discs) under newer OS's. Not much to really worry about, but at least a folder full of negatives can still be used, decades later. Will we always be able to say the same about digital files?
 
Data is only worth the effort you put in to protecting it. I have the advantage (or possibly curse) of having set up company-level backups and I apply many of the same principles to my home set-up. It ain't cheap......
 
Purchase two new identical PCs from a local PC builder (my specs) and one SSD failed after a few months....both replaced plus all others from that particular manufacturers batch.
This was about 6 years ago and I don't remember the manufacturer...….except that it was a recognised mainstream brand.
Luckily both 'home' PCs and I have always taken disk images every month.

PS. Both PCs still running well!
Probably OCZ. One of the earliest vendors of SSDs but also one of the least reliable.
 
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