Hi Steve, Hi everyone,
I would like to share my recent experience in hope that it will also help others.
Few weeks ago I have purchased two SSD drives in order to replace system drives that I use in computer at work, and also my personal laptop that I use for work when out of office. After installing drives and transferring all data, everything was fine for few days, but in work PC SSD died after 48 hours of running. After troubleshooting with Spinrite and other tools I had on my disposal I concluded that SSD had firmware failure that was very common. Firmware on the drive is generic, and when it encounters some problem with memory chips or whatever it triggers some kind of lock mode, shows itself to motherboard bios as SATAFIRM and Spinrite is not able to access the drive (I have found similar situation in one post on this forum from 2023.) Since my situation is different, and it was rather old post, I figured I should make new post.
So, I have plugged old SSD back, restored some data that was generated in those 48 hours, and sent new SSD back for RMA.
Since I have the same SSD in my laptop, from same batch, serial numbers are consecutive ones, I was fully expecting it to fail in same manner. So, the best thing I could think of was to use Spinrite Level 3 mode to rewrite whole SSD in hope if it was prone to same failure to fail during the test. Since it is 1 TB drive, it took few hours to finish the treatment, and it finished without error. Interesting observation it took 1% of drive's expected lifetime (when started it was 100%, when ended 99%). I guess that is well worth of the time and SSD life spent, to have at least some security in reliability of the drive.
I don't have SSD model and serials at the time of writing (I write at work PC, failed one is still on RMA request back to supplier, and other one is at home), but if needed for reference, I can provide them on request. Also, worth noting is that initial writing to the working and tested drive was around 200 GB (that is data I had on old drive on my laptop, that I simply cloned). Also what was puzzling for me, my old drive in laptop was same brand and similar model, that was working without hitch for 3-4 years, and it is still at 93% of lifetime expected. I just ran out of space.
My question for Steve and other people who have used Spinrite on SSD drives is: Is the Level 3 test with Spinrite good enough to trigger this kind of failure? Why I ask this? I have backups and in case of failure, I can restore computer to working order, but where I live RMA can take up to weeks, so I would like to know if could dispose of old SSD drives, or I should still keep the for reserve. I understand failures can come in some other ways, and when least expected, but still my disaster recovery plan is different if I have one drive to fail in some distant future or two drives to fail probably next week.
Many regards from Velimir, Bosnia and Herzegovina
I would like to share my recent experience in hope that it will also help others.
Few weeks ago I have purchased two SSD drives in order to replace system drives that I use in computer at work, and also my personal laptop that I use for work when out of office. After installing drives and transferring all data, everything was fine for few days, but in work PC SSD died after 48 hours of running. After troubleshooting with Spinrite and other tools I had on my disposal I concluded that SSD had firmware failure that was very common. Firmware on the drive is generic, and when it encounters some problem with memory chips or whatever it triggers some kind of lock mode, shows itself to motherboard bios as SATAFIRM and Spinrite is not able to access the drive (I have found similar situation in one post on this forum from 2023.) Since my situation is different, and it was rather old post, I figured I should make new post.
So, I have plugged old SSD back, restored some data that was generated in those 48 hours, and sent new SSD back for RMA.
Since I have the same SSD in my laptop, from same batch, serial numbers are consecutive ones, I was fully expecting it to fail in same manner. So, the best thing I could think of was to use Spinrite Level 3 mode to rewrite whole SSD in hope if it was prone to same failure to fail during the test. Since it is 1 TB drive, it took few hours to finish the treatment, and it finished without error. Interesting observation it took 1% of drive's expected lifetime (when started it was 100%, when ended 99%). I guess that is well worth of the time and SSD life spent, to have at least some security in reliability of the drive.
I don't have SSD model and serials at the time of writing (I write at work PC, failed one is still on RMA request back to supplier, and other one is at home), but if needed for reference, I can provide them on request. Also, worth noting is that initial writing to the working and tested drive was around 200 GB (that is data I had on old drive on my laptop, that I simply cloned). Also what was puzzling for me, my old drive in laptop was same brand and similar model, that was working without hitch for 3-4 years, and it is still at 93% of lifetime expected. I just ran out of space.
My question for Steve and other people who have used Spinrite on SSD drives is: Is the Level 3 test with Spinrite good enough to trigger this kind of failure? Why I ask this? I have backups and in case of failure, I can restore computer to working order, but where I live RMA can take up to weeks, so I would like to know if could dispose of old SSD drives, or I should still keep the for reserve. I understand failures can come in some other ways, and when least expected, but still my disaster recovery plan is different if I have one drive to fail in some distant future or two drives to fail probably next week.
Many regards from Velimir, Bosnia and Herzegovina
