Yet another SSD "failure out of nowhere"

[NviGate Systems]

I always support older machines. You also would be surprised because you can get referral that way as often one customer knows another in the same bind.

When I was still in my early 20's I made money helping a business with a printer they had an issue with. They were still using a Style writer on a 68K mac. But because that's how he ran his business he was happy to hand over $200 because I found him another printer. That $200 was chump change compared to him having to buy new everything.

When I worked at one shop I built several HP T510 thin clients into tiny XP Machines for a guy who had industrial equipment that needed XP and a serial port to run. It would cost him $10,000 to replace perfectly working machines. I sold him 2 control boxes for $200, one as a replacement and one as a backup to sit in the shelf until needed.

The need is still there, and if you have the skills and equipment, you can charge almost whatever you want because for them finding someone who knows this old stuff is rare.

 

[sapphirescales]

The need is still there, and if you have the skills and equipment, you can charge almost whatever you want because for them finding someone who knows this old stuff is rare.

I second this. I charge an absolute premium for working on old hardware but it's so much cheaper and easier than buying all new stuff that people will pay it! I once charged $5,000 to replace some old hardware that ran an industrial embroidery business. They had 5x machines worth $20,000 apiece that would only run on Windows XP. My cost was about $200 in hardware and 5 hours of my time. One of the machines failed a few years later and I charged another $1,500 to come replace it. I used an old XP box I got for free the day before. Replaced the hard drive with a CF card and installed a fresh version of XP and it was ready to go.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

5.25 inch Bigfoot drives SPRING to memory

I can't count how many garbage cans we had stacked with dead Bigfoots back in the days, heading for the dumpster...when Packard Bell 486x and first gen Pentiums were still popular, and many other brands....Compaq and IBM used them also. This was back in the day when I worked for 2x ComputerLand locations....they had large service departments, so...yeah, literally....filled garbage cans that we lugged to the big dumpster behind the plaza.

Quantum later tried to shed the bad rep, renaming them "Tsunami" drives. Still sucked! Different problem that made them horrible, but...yeah.
Another horrible drive manufacturer eventually bought them out, Maxtor. They deserved each other.

I do remember those IBM "Deathstar" drives too...but man, they were FAST!

 

[Sky-Knight]

I do remember those IBM "Deathstar" drives too...but man, they were FAST!

That's because they ran that "Pixie Dust" technology, that's be basis for the techniques used on all modern platter drives. So imagine the general performance of a modern 12tb disk, but limited to 6gb. Yeah... they were quick! But IBM hadn't worked out the bugs in manufacturing yet.

 

[labtech]

If the device has ball bearing supported platters, yes... that's largely true. Unless the lubricant in the bearings dries out they'll live in effect forever. But modern drives don't use that tech. I'm not sure what they use, but I've seen that bearing fail just sitting there given enough time. That time is measured in decades, but they do still go bad.

Personally I'd trust an SSD on the shelf unplugged far more than a platter. But I also live in a VERY dusty and dry environment that loves to eat things with moving parts of any kind. So it might be my experience is skewed by that reality.

Flash chip technology begins leaking the electrons in the cells with time. After a year without powering on, some even sooner, the SSD will start showing bad sectors.
They absolutely must be powered on. I would recommend minimum once a month.

Also, only certain HDDs have been affected by the liquid bearing problem, where Toshiba 2.5" models were most affected. Most others are fine.

 

[labtech]

This is why I use WD Blues or Samsungs only.

When the SSDs start approaching their write endurance limits, the app on Windows starts screaming about it... IN ADVANCE.

If it's really critical, the Samsung Pro devices, when they hit the endurance limit fail into a read only state, which is particularly nice.

But otherwise, yes, when you suffer a controller failure it's an instant dead disk. Platter drives have the exact same failure mode, they just also have a ton more failure modes that are more likely, the kind that make the disk slow down or otherwise misbehave so you know it's coming. SSDs never do that... they simply up and stop one day, just like a bad thumb drive.

Controllers on SSDs rarely fail.

The NAND Flash chips begin degrading, eventually running out of the overprovisioning blocks of data reserved for bad sector replacement.

At that point firmware issues develop (translation related most times), preventing the controller from communicating with the firmware related data on the NAND chips. If the controller cannot communicate with the chips, then the SSD won't initialize correctly, showing incorrect capacity.

Other times, the controller could be busy processing endless "reallocation processes" running in the background, again preventing the drive from being recognized by the BIOS/system.

Sometimes there are flaws in the firmware code design, thus causing firmware execution issues, sometimes complete lockups (HP SSD with the hour related lock up), etc.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

That's because they ran that "Pixie Dust" technology, that's be basis for the techniques used on all modern platter drives. So imagine the general performance of a modern 12tb disk, but limited to 6gb. Yeah... they were quick! But IBM hadn't worked out the bugs in manufacturing yet.

One of the first 7,200 rpm drives also...back when 5,400rpm was common place. I think the bigfoots were only 5,000 rpm.

 

[Sky-Knight]

One of the first 7,200 rpm drives also...back when 5,400rpm was common place. I think the bigfoots were only 5,000 rpm.

Quantum Bigfoot - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Even slower! 3600RPM or later 4000RPM

I had to look that up because I was remembering only 3k RPM.

 

[GTP]

I'm an ADATA hater - by far, one of the most failed drives I've seen.

Can't fault ADATA. Never had one fail yet.