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ph77 · 2010-05-06, 14:05

My brand new and first ever SSD disk lasted 3 days...
Monday I installed it on my new HTPC and this morning it would not boot.
BIOS reports "SMART supported but command failed". Disabled SMART but still Ubuntu would not boot. I booted from a usb stick, the partitions are there, disk "is healthy" according to Disk utility but I cannot mount them. I/O errors all the time. GParted manages to delete the partitions but then magically they appear again! I tried to dd the whole disk and again I get I/O errors. The partitions are there as ghosts, just impossible to read them or delete them.
The drive is a Kingston SSDNow V-Series 30GB (SNV125-S2/30GB).
I have no idea what happened. Until yesterday it worked fine and fast. I had no ata errors in syslog and the pc was shutdown normally.
I am going to replace it but I am not sure I want to risk it again. I am thinking to buy a normal 2.5'' small sata drive and forget about SSD altogether for now.
Have you had any SSD failures?

prae5 · 2010-05-06, 14:12

ph77 Wrote:I am going to replace it but I am not sure I want to risk it again. I am thinking to buy a normal 2.5'' small sata drive and forget about SSD altogether for now.
Have you had any SSD failures?

What makes you think it wouldn't have happened with a regular drive? Hardware fails - I've had plenty of mechanical drives that have been doa or die within a few days. Hell, I've have faulty replacement drives occasionally.

Its just one of those things, it happens, get another ssd and you will be fine.

ph77 · 2010-05-06, 14:24

prae5 Wrote:What makes you think it wouldn't have happened with a regular drive? Hardware fails - I've had plenty of mechanical drives that have been doa or die within a few days. Hell, I've have faulty replacement drives occasionally.

Its just one of those things, it happens, get another ssd and you will be fine.

Yes, I guess for everything there is a first time. I have had mechanical drive failures but only after several years of use, never a brand new one.

prae5 · 2010-05-06, 14:33

ph77 Wrote:Yes, I guess for everything there is a first time. I have had mechanical drive failures but only after several years of use, never a brand new one.

You clearly haven't had enough drives then Laugh

ion_man · 2010-05-06, 14:55

ph77 Wrote:Yes, I guess for everything there is a first time. I have had mechanical drive failures but only after several years of use, never a brand new one.

DOA hard disks are quite common, I always do a burn-in whenever I get a new drive by running: badblocks -svw /dev/sdx in Linux (replace x with device letter)

It takes several hours but so far my experience is that when a drive passes that test without errors it will last many years.

ph77 · 2010-05-06, 15:21

ion_man Wrote:DOA hard disks are quite common, I always do a burn-in whenever I get a new drive by running: badblocks -svw /dev/sdx in Linux (replace x with device letter)

It takes several hours but so far my experience is that when a drive passes that test without errors it will last many years.

Thanks, I'll test the replacement this way for sure. The current disk has 109 bad blocks according to e2fsck.

akelley · 2010-05-10, 14:59

Sorry to hear about that, ph77. I've had DOA drives and drive failures, but never one in such a short period of time - send the drive back to the retailer and don't bother with the RMA through Kingston. ion_man gave good advice about doing a burn-in on all new drives.

**Starstream** · 2010-05-10, 18:27

I've had the occasional USB flash drive (+ 1 SSD) just die on me, all data lost. In my experience over the years usually you have some degree of warning signs with a failing HDD and even then sometimes the data can be recovered.

Thats why I steer clear of SSD's on anything critical, all my data is on a NAS using traditional HD's. My Asrock Ion 330 has an SSD but thats okay if it dies.