Lifespan of an SSD - total failure after 1.5 years

[Taz]

I read the Newegg reviews and from the dates of most of the bad reviews, it looks like that was around the time I bought mine. I bought mine off eBay (yeah, I know!!!) in early January 2016. As bedtime reading last night I looked into SDD technology a bit more and it appears that an SSD is far more likely to suddenly fail than a mechanical hard drive. The latter will at least make some noise and come up with some errors before it fails.

So for now I will forego the very quick boot up time for data stability and integrity.

[DanceswithUnix]

The latter will at least make some noise and come up with some errors before it fails.

Nah, had plenty that didn't give any warning. The one where a head fell off was particularly dramatic.

I am convinced that Windows is now written on the assumption that you have an SSD. You build a machine with a hard drive and it works fine, then some months down the line you find it takes maybe 15 minutes with the disk light lit up before the box is usable. Tracing what is going on shows windows update processes scanning the system, and no amount of messing about seems to make it go away, but with an SSD the scan is over in no time.

Perhaps Apple is still OK, but I think Microsoft have forgotten how to do light IO loading of background tasks. I have one Windows install in the house still on hard drive, and I think I have a very patient daughter or she would have complained enough that I would have upgraded her PC storage by now

[Taz]

Some not so good news on the official SanDisk Ultra II forums either:

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/SanDisk...k-Ultra-II-SSD

The advice there seems to be that if your computer doesn't detect the SSD then it's most likely completely dead.

[Biscuit]

*Checks drives in work pc*

*sees that both are Sandisk and one is a Ultra II*

*Calculates how long drives have been in the machine*

*Immediately creates backup images*

[Noxvayl]

*Checks drives in work pc*

*sees that both are Sandisk and one is a Ultra II*

*Calculates how long drives have been in the machine*

*Immediately creates backup images*

hahaha, quality.

Are you the IT guy at work as well?

[Moby-Dick]

you mention that you are doing hibernation on your machine ? I have heard of a few cases in the past where this can shorten SSD life due to the additional write activity. SSD's "wear" during write cycles - these are measured in terms of Device writes per day ( DWPD ) - a 1Tb device with an endurance of 0.3 DWDP is designed to have about 300Gb of data written to it per day over its warrantied lifespan for example. On hibernate , the contents of the machine ram is written to the hibernation file ( say 16GB )

[Biscuit]

hahaha, quality.

Are you the IT guy at work as well?

No this is just my personal work machine. I work as a satellite employee from home

[EndlessWaves]

It has bombed on Newegg though as probably the one with amongst the worst complaints:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16820173012

User reviews present a distorted picture of these sorts of things. They're great for highlighting specific problems but very poor at statistical issues such as whether a larger than normal proportion of drives have faults.

Put it this way, the notorious OCZ Vertex III has 4 stars on newegg:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16820227706

I am convinced that Windows is now written on the assumption that you have an SSD. You build a machine with a hard drive and it works fine, then some months down the line you find it takes maybe 15 minutes with the disk light lit up before the box is usable. Tracing what is going on shows windows update processes scanning the system, and no amount of messing about seems to make it go away, but with an SSD the scan is over in no time.

That's not normal behaviour. I'm transitioning from a 7200rpm 2.5" drive based system that upgraded to Windows 10 on release day and it still feels just as fast as it didn't then. The SSD system is faster to go after startup of course, but the hard drive system takes about 15-30 seconds to finish loading after it hits the desktop from a restart. On a normal hybrid start it's just a few seconds.

I know older versions of Windows have had some Windows update issues over the past couple of years though, such as taking hours to check for updates.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

User reviews present a distorted picture of these sorts of things. They're great for highlighting specific problems but very poor at statistical issues such as whether a larger than normal proportion of drives have faults.

Put it this way, the notorious OCZ Vertex III has 4 stars on newegg:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16820227706

People can ignore it all they want - do you really think I would say this without looking?? Ultra II 480GB/960GB models had a price reduction during the later part of 2015,and you can track back the spike of failures looking at Newegg,Amazon,etc from people who bought the drives between late 2015 and middle 2016(the model was released in 2014 BTW). Its the same problem - suddenly not working on reboot.

Its no doubt some issue with the drives made during that point.

If anything the fact that you point out the OCZ drive as being reviewed better,indicates the Sandisk does have an issue.

Out of 4 people I know who had Sandisk Ultra II drives,three had them fail in exactly the same way and the other mate I know never switches his PC off so probably he might be fine. It was the same with certain other drives which had issues,it was only when people started making more and more noise when OCZ admitted an issue.

There is a problem with the drive,but Sandisk has made sure they buried it. I also like how quietly they gave away a few drives on here,in late 2016,which I thought was weird since the design had been out for a while,ie, since 2014 and towards the end of its life.

[ik9000]

did you run it with as a caching drive, or with defragging and similar HDD tech activated? SSDs need a different treatment. Anyone running multipass erase routines also wants to be careful with consumer SSDs. Write wear is a bigger issue on SSDs.

[ik9000]

hahaha, quality.

Are you the IT guy at work as well?

no, he said he made back-up images.

edit: that's unfair, our IT guys here are good. I've seen IT elsewhere however.... well...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

did you run it with as a caching drive, or with defragging and similar HDD tech activated? SSDs need a different treatment. Anyone running multipass erase routines also wants to be careful with consumer SSDs. Write wear is a bigger issue on SSDs.

I have had many SSDs myself,and I in terms of data written and read off it,it was not that much and this was running Windows 10 from the start. To put in context,the Kingston 120gb I won on Hexus 5 years ago still works.

Even the Sandisk software said the drive was at 100% too,as I tend to just check the SMART stats,etc every day or so with SSDs,just in case I notice some weird increase in writes,since I am conscious these can cause problems.

Also now I remember,one of my relatives also had a pair of SSDs die,and I just realised one was a Ultra II(other was a Plus I think) in two different machines. I need to ask them when they got their SSDs.

Hmm,look like Sandisk is deffo on my avoid list now!!

no, he said he made back-up images.

edit: that's unfair, our IT guys here are good. I've seen IT elsewhere however.... well...

I tend to do backups when I can,but I didn't do a proper one for like two months,but in the end it nearly broke an extensively modded FO4 playthrough(which was at 400+ hours),since one or two of the mods were not on the Nexus anymore,but luckily I managed to track them down.

If you mod a game,always back up the mods,since people do withdraw them if they CBA with them anymore(the one I used was a settlement organisation mod).

[Taz]

you mention that you are doing hibernation on your machine ? I have heard of a few cases in the past where this can shorten SSD life due to the additional write activity. SSD's "wear" during write cycles - these are measured in terms of Device writes per day ( DWPD ) - a 1Tb device with an endurance of 0.3 DWDP is designed to have about 300Gb of data written to it per day over its warrantied lifespan for example. On hibernate , the contents of the machine ram is written to the hibernation file ( say 16GB )

Yes. A couple of months ago I was going to switch over to Windows 10 completely. However, after a week of using it, I missed macOS too much. I then reinstalled macOS on my Mac mini and copied my data back onto it. I guess the power options were set to default, in that they attempt to power off drives. Prior to this, for the last few years, I've always ensured that my Mac mini doesn't go into sleep mode. There's a tiny white LED on the front of the Mac mini's case and I noticed that this was pulsing on and off very slowly when the Mac was in sleep mode.

I didn't think anything of it, but I've also now read that power cycles shorten the life of SSDs. I have a horrible feeling that the Mac was switching off power to the SSD when it was in sleep mode. And I'm sure I read last night that SSDs should be constantly powered whilst your PC/desktop is on. I'm now wondering whether this has caused an early demise of the SSD.

[watercooled]

Hmm, I also have this exact SSD. I got it at the end of 2015 so it's a bit older than yours, but it's not used that much either, only as a secondary game drive. Due to that it's not holding anything really valuable (not even game saves) at least. I just checked to see if there are any firmware updates, but there aren't any.

I wouldn't necessarily let it tarnish the brand though, I can't think of many major SSD manufacturers that haven't had any major firmware bugs, and this is just the one drive AFAIK. Come to think of it Sandisk haven't released any new SATA SSDs in ages - maybe they'll just be WD branded now? It's a shame because they've produced some of the highest performance drives available, e.g. the Sandisk Extreme Pro is still amongst the fastest SATA drives.

WRT being a 'just' a memory card manufacturer - together with Toshiba (much like IMFT being a joint venture between Micron and Intel) they're one of the handful of major NAND manufacturers in the world, the others being Samsung and SK Hynix.

Also I've just checked and the Ultra II has a 3 year warranty so it should still be covered if you want to get it replaced.

[watercooled]

Come to think of it Sandisk haven't released any new SATA SSDs in ages

Aaand 33 minutes after I made that statement... http://www.anandtech.com/show/11676/...-now-available

[Taz]

I'm now keeping my Time Machine external HDD connected at all times to my Mac mini. It's providing hourly backups and can detect no noticeable impact although all I ever do is surf the web, emails and Skype on the Mac.

Yesterday I connected the failed SanDisk Ultra II 480GB SSD to my Windows PC via a data cable but it's not detected by the PC. However, when using a SATA to USB cable, the BIOS sees a drive and Logical Disk Manager in Windows 10 detects a drive too and wants me to initialise it.

So, later this evening I will remove it from inside the PC and connect it via an adapter cable to a USB port on the Windows PC and initialise it to see what happens.