hotwire wrote:
Thanks for the info.. Thank Goodness I did a small backup of a few files a few weeks before this happened.
I actually had more trust on these SSDs than my older disk drives. The worst length of failure I had with the older disk drives was at least a bit over 1.5 years.
Anyhow, I will check my warranty, I believe it is 3 yrs, not sure.
Thanks.
Sounds like data isn't critical, and good that you backed some up. I'd like to comment on the last post a little, even though your post gives me the feeling you are pretty competent user, it may help some other people to shift their focus on searching around for a drive that should last and shouldn't fail.. based on flimsy ideals.
I understand the feeling of trust, and why some people will think a certain drive is better than another in some way. The reference to the Backblaze test that precedes a lot of posts is an example. But the absolute best idea is to not trust ANY drive. For the record, backblaze doesn't either, they often seem to play around with drives just to see how they go.. they also have failures of the drives that are the "winners" too.
If you structure your backups so that any failure of a drive won't be a major headache, then you have peace of mind. I know this gets said a lot. but I would like to break it down a little more and explain why this is not just a random comment, or just a thing that everyone says.
If you buy a drive in the view that you have done your research, and talked to people and chosen a good drive.. you still really are in a position where you don't really know the outcome of a failure. If you live by the knowledge that drives die, in many different circumstances, then you are in a "Known State".
There are things that can affect the best drive on the planet:
lightning
spill drink on your computer
power surge
bad power supply in computer
failing components somewhere in the system
cat pee-ing on your computer
theft of computer
crypto malware
some kind of user error or accidental format, partition etc.
Remember that when you think about the hard disk, you really have to take into account more than just the disk. Also, what you are putting it in, what power you are supplying it with, what the OS is doing to the disk, environment(hot, dusty, static electricity, humidity, physical strains such as in a laptop moving around).
Case in point: TLC NAND chips are not perfect. it is actually impossible to manufacture these without errors. So the manufacturers build in systems like sophisticated Maths - ECC for correcting errors.. Marking columns in the chip as bad, don't use them.. cutting part of the data areas off from use, special read retries to get the data in a kind of best guess system. It is like we know that 1 + 2 = 3. any one of those numbers can be lost and we know how to recreate that statement.
If you plan for failure, you are actually better off than the guy that paid $900 for an enterprise hard drive but has no failure plan.
One thing this post had me thinking about is where are the good solid tutorials or information sites that allow a regular person to follow a set of guidelines for a backup strategy? I would love to be able to link to something to show that backing up in such a way that your hard drive choice is flexible is not out of reach. It is easy for some of us more involved in technology to think of how to do it, but the regular person is just as likely to click on a crypto-malware link as they are searching for a backup solution than be able to get it right, alone, without some major effort.
The newer stuff that's coming out with TLC NAND, things like 8 layer 128GB chips, encryption and the like makes me worried for peoples data.