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12/29/2015 09:23:37 PM · #1 |
I have had the first PC which used a SSD for a hard drive now for almost 2 years.
I thought I'd share my recent experience.
"Diamonds are forever, but SSD's are not."
My PC has been acting up over the past three or so weeks, it's more sluggish, and for the last two or three days, has hung where Windows doesn't respond more than a few times. I checked the drive with Microsoft tools, tried to repair Windows 8.1 per their instructions. Cleaned off junk. Nothing worked.
Finally, despite the fact that the drive tested fine, I decided to replace it. I had bought a new SSD when they were on sale a few weeks ago, and even cloned my existing one over, just in case what I was seeing was the beginning of drive failure. If the drive failed, I would be ready.
Well, after trying everything, even changing antivirus software, and not believing it really was the drive, I decided to swap the new drive in. I stayed with the 3 week old build in case there was something corrupted in the current one.
Voila. Despite testing fine, the drive which had nothing wrong with it, was the culprit. The lesson: SSDs don't last forever, especially as your system drive. I have an older SSD which is used daily for data, but it's still going strong. I recommend keeping a spare around!
And my system is much faster now than it's been in recent months. Partly I'm sure because the drive is newer, and partly because the newer models are faster and better!
Feel free to use this thread to share any experiences you have here with your SSD so we all benefit. |
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12/29/2015 10:43:58 PM · #2 |
| my experience has been the opposite. when i had hard disks in the past, no matter how hard i tried to keep the organized, the computer inevitably slowed down. my solid state performs as fast as the day i bought it and i currently only have 500 megs left on it. the drive is 3 years old. |
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12/29/2015 10:59:27 PM · #3 |
In order to have a valid MTBF statistic for drives it is necessary to have outliers at either end of the curve ... :-)  |
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12/30/2015 12:11:09 AM · #4 |
Well the drive diagnostics said 60% of the lifespan was used, so I think it was more of a defect.
However, the fact that I'm on my computer 12-16 hours a day (I work at home, on the computer, and then either also work at night, and weekends, or work on my photographs), and more likely the fact that I allow the drive to be used for caching probably affected lifespan. For example, my new drive--cloned on 12/5 from my drive, shows 33,000 photos in the cache for Adobe Raw (Lightroom). Caching and writes will definitely affect lifespan, but the performance gains are probably worth it.
To understand what else might have gone wrong I did a bit of research and found this article.
Apparently, I also have superfetch enabled (just checked), which is not necessary on a SSD and can result in unnecessary writes.
Finally, I left the drive mounted in the computer so I didn't get a good look at it, but it was the drive that I had configured with the computer when I bought it...it may not have been as good as my Intel SSD I use for my database, or the new Sandisk SSD I bought to replace it. But I wanted, for the most part, the computer to come ready to do work!
Message edited by author 2015-12-30 01:41:17. |
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12/30/2015 08:40:11 AM · #5 |
I find it a bit disconcerting that everything was saying your drive was fine when it wasn't.
I run a laptop and a desktop - both with SSD's as their primary drive, and haven't had any issues. Absolutely love the speed. Both SSD's are Crucial (laptop is 256G, desktop is 512G). |
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12/30/2015 09:19:48 AM · #6 |
| My guess here is that there may have been nothing wrong with the flash media itself on Neil's drive, but there could have been an issue with the controller or wear leveling algorithm that was causing high latency. That said, there are definitely scenarios where software can cause early SSD failure; I'm acutely aware of one of these (not in the consumer market space). I doubt that was the case here, as a test would have shown problems. |
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12/30/2015 11:10:32 AM · #7 |
If I had any SATA ports left on my machine, it would have been interesting to hook up both drives and reformat the original SSD and see if that helped.
Sometime when I'm not busy, perhaps I can pull the drive out and put it in my external dock. I didn't look at it carefully, but it didn't look like a typical 2.5" SSD...it looked like it was a 3.5" drive (electronics board) and the 2.5" SATA mounted on top...something like that. I'd have had to remove it to see it better. Perhaps someday down the road. I was more interested at this point in getting it up and running again as it's my busiest time of year. |
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