Completed a really surprising repair today.
Someone had a dead SSD. Totally dead, not powering up, not showing up in the bios, nothing.
I did the rest where you feel for warm spots and it was painfully hot on a bank of capacitors. Caps were a dead short No way to replace them with my tools, parts, and skill, but it seemed like they could be removed without killing the drive so I removed one at a time until the short released. Drive fired back up. Was even able to boot up the original computer and removed critical files.
Surprising because I didn't think that'd actually work!
Someone had a dead SSD. Totally dead, not powering up, not showing up in the bios, nothing.
I did the rest where you feel for warm spots and it was painfully hot on a bank of capacitors. Caps were a dead short No way to replace them with my tools, parts, and skill, but it seemed like they could be removed without killing the drive so I removed one at a time until the short released. Drive fired back up. Was even able to boot up the original computer and removed critical files.
Surprising because I didn't think that'd actually work!
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@sj_zero SSDs seem far more prone than HDDs to sudden death.
I made the mistake of reusing SSDs from an old server. Soon enough I had a double fault and a dead RAID set. No more of that.
I had someone trying to tell me that the dominant failure mode of SSDs is they just go read only, but I've had tons of SSDs fail on me (I've been responsible for fairly sizable fleets of computers), and the dominant failure is almost exclusively catastrophic data loss. Only one SSD has ever gone into read only mode (and thank god they did, it was the SSD hosting this website)
Older SSDs without power loss protection can not just lose all their data but become unusable in just one UPS failure.
Older SSDs without power loss protection can not just lose all their data but become unusable in just one UPS failure.
@sj_zero Yes exactly what I've seen. I get the "Storage check FAIL" email, go check, and one of them is just plain dead. Sometimes they recover, but mostly they don't.
Now USB flash drives, I've often seen them fail slow. You can still read them but writing is nearly impossible. HDDs also get slow before they fail; I have had some fun troubleshooting sessions to figure out which of several it is.
But SSDs are not trustworthy outside of a RAID or mirror set.