Lifespan of an SSD - total failure after 1.5 years

[Taz]

About a year and a half ago I opened up my Mac Mini and replaced the system mechanical drive with a Sandisk Ultra II 500GB SSD. I relegated the mechanical system drive as a secondary drive for my iTunes music files.

Yesterday I experienced a complete SSD drive failure, which was my OS drive. I've never had a disk failure before in any computer that I've owned.

There were no real warning signs. But I did notice that my Mac Mini was going into sleep mode when unattended over the last couple of months. I don't know if that's related.

Fortunately I have a backup using Time Machine so restoring shouldn't be an issue. I've ordered a replacement 500GB 2.5" mechanical drive rather than another SSD just to be on the safe side as I intend to upgrade to a new Mac Mini if Apple release one in a few months time.

I've attached a SATA to USB cable to the defective SSD and it cannot be read on my Windows PC (it's not even detected as a hard drive). The Recovery mode on my Mac Mini doesn't see it as a drive either (via USB). So I'm presuming it's toast.

Has anyone had an SSD fail so quickly on them? I've got mechanical drives from almost a decade ago that are still working fine as backup drives.

[peterb]

I think you have probably been unlucky after 18 months, but I yours isn't the first case reported of an SSD suddenly failing catastrophically. OTOH, there are millions of SSDs working quite happily out there. All it really shows is that there is still no substitute for a proper back-up regime for critical data.

I use SSDs for operating systems and store data on mechanical drives - with a back-up regime for critical data (including OS config files). I ought to take an 'as-installed' image of the OS for really fast restoration in the event of a failure but re-installing isn't too great a great faff if the config files are available.

[Bagnaj97]

I've had a Sandisk Ultra II die in the same way (just vanished, not visible in bios/OS on any machine), as has Cat-the-Fifth. Personally I'd be very wary of buying another Sandisk SSD. My ancient 64GB G.Skill Falcon (rebadged OCZ Vertex) is still fine, as are my Plextor, Crucial and SK Hynix SSDs. If it was just mine that had gone I'd have thought nothing of it, but I think the failure rate of Sandisks does seem higher now.

Mine was ~5 months old when it went, Sandisk made the return process easy enough - UPS label to print and then drop the disk off at a localish newsagent - and the replacement is still ok just over a year later.

[satrow]

There's a generic method you could use to check it:

A sudden power loss is a common cause for a system to fail to recognize an SSD, or not detect one it was previously able to. In most cases, your SSD can be returned to normal operating condition by completing a power cycle, a process that will take approximately one hour.

We recommend you...

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial...tem/ta-p/65215

[Taz]

I've got a 1TB Sandisk Ultra II in my Windows 10 PC that recently built. It's only got X-Plane 11 on it and some data at the moment. At least on Windows you can run apps from the SSD manufacturer to indicate the health of the SSD - I'm using SanDisk Dashboard and Samsung Magician. Apple doesn't want you to change drives in their hardware so don't support third-party SSDs so it's a bit of a risk. They also don't enable things like TRIM for drives that are not Apple-approved.

I think my next Mac Mini will have an SSD installed from the factory!

[Taz]

There's a generic method you could use to check it:



http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial...tem/ta-p/65215

I saw this page briefly last night just before I was about to sleep. I will try this process over the weekend. It's worth giving it a go, but I certainly won't be using the faulty SSD in any computer going forward. I may end up cloning the SSD to my new 500GB mechanical drive is the SSD comes back to life.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My Sandisk Ultra II 480GB also died in around 18 months and I know someone else on OcUK forums who had one or two of their 960GB models do the same.

There seems to be a bug,that the Sandisk Ultra II SSDs,will be perfectly fine(Sandisk dashboard said it was 100%),and on reboot they just die.

If you look on Newegg,you can see the same thing:

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

You can see the large amount of people saying the same thing. It does make me wonder why they were the cheapest 480GB drives for quite a while.

People have even had replacements doe EXACTLY the same. Plus if you look on Amazon,the Ultra II seems to have a worse failure rate - the Samsung and Crucial ones have far less issues,and its always a similar story,they just suddenly go from fine to not working during boot.

There's a generic method you could use to check it:



http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial...tem/ta-p/65215

Tried that and does nothing - the SSD just died. My Kingston 120GB drive still works after 5 years!!

I've got a 1TB Sandisk Ultra II in my Windows 10 PC that recently built. It's only got X-Plane 11 on it and some data at the moment. At least on Windows you can run apps from the SSD manufacturer to indicate the health of the SSD - I'm using SanDisk Dashboard and Samsung Magician. Apple doesn't want you to change drives in their hardware so don't support third-party SSDs so it's a bit of a risk. They also don't enable things like TRIM for drives that are not Apple-approved.

I think my next Mac Mini will have an SSD installed from the factory!

I am running Windows and the Sandisk dashboard said 100% and then the drive refused to boot one day.

[Taz]

I saw this reply on the link that satrow posted and I'm convinced this is what happened to my SSD:

I'm sorry to hear the SSD is not working as expected.
rubbish
It sounds as if the issues are related to power management of the SSD port. If that is the case, you will want to look at the power savings options in your BIOS. Make sure they are set to not power off the drive during idle times, in other words, you want the SSD to have full power at all times. You may also want to check and make sure that you have the latest BIOS on your NUC.

As I mentioned, I noted that my Mac Mini was going to full sleep mode after a period of inactivity. This would have been a setting under power management. I suspect that that when my Mac went into sleep mode, it shut the power to the SSD.

Since I've owned the Mac it has never gone into sleep mode until a couple of months ago. It just blanked the screen. I rebuilt the OS a couple of months ago and probably left it at the default power management settings.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I saw this reply on the link that satrow posted and I'm convinced this is what happened to my SSD:



As I mentioned, I noted that my Mac Mini was going to full sleep mode after a period of inactivity. This would have been a setting under power management. I suspect that that when my Mac went into sleep mode, it shut the power to the SSD.

Since I've owned the Mac it has never gone into sleep mode until a couple of months ago. It just blanked the screen. I rebuilt the OS a couple of months ago and probably left it at the default power management settings.

That is for a Crucial drive,look at the Newegg link,the drives will just die at boot. If you don't tend to boot your PC that much,they seem to be OKish.

[Kumagoro]

Apparently you can now activate trim on non apple SSDs in OSX using a terminal command, so I have been told.

[Millennium]

Looks like you had bad luck with your SSD, will avoid Sandisk in future. They are really a memory CARD player after all.

[Taz]

System has been restored with a backup from two weeks ago onto the new 500GB HDD. That only took 30 minutes from start to finish. It then took an hour or so to sync up the macOS Mail app to pick up emails from the last two weeks from my various email accounts and to download one music track from iTunes that I had purchased last week.

I was very impressed with a full system restore onto a blank HDD. macOS picked up my Time Machine external drive (the one with the backup from two weeks ago) and allowed me select a backup to restore. The system then worked exactly as I had it two weeks ago. I had to re-enter my iCloud and iTunes passwords and that was it.

As for the TRIM - I did do that using a command entered via Terminal when I first got the SanDisk Ultra II SSD but there have been a couple of OS updates since and I imagine that they would have turned TRIM off. I also noticed that in the 'Energy Saving' utility, the default option is to power off drives if it's possible to do so. I suspect that the OS wasn't aware that I had an SSD installed that needed power all the time.



And you have to hand it to Amazon for their amazing packaging of the HDD that I ordered yesterday. It was security 'sealed':



The end flaps were not sealed in any way!

[Noxvayl]

OCZ, Intel or Crucial are my brands of choice for SSDs. Luckily not had a failure with my SanDisk drives.

[EndlessWaves]

Looks like you had bad luck with your SSD, will avoid Sandisk in future. They are really a memory CARD player after all.

Uh. Memory cards and SSD use the same technology.

In terms of the Ultra II, looking at Hardware.fr's last few reports of return rates in the first six months to a major French retailer it does seem to be consistently higher than most models:
http://www.hardware.fr/tag/757/taux-retour.html

Although it's certainly nowhere near the return rates you'd see on a drive with major reliability problems. Also, compare it with the hard drive numbers.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Uh. Memory cards and SSD use the same technology.

In terms of the Ultra II, looking at Hardware.fr's last few reports of return rates in the first six months to a major French retailer it does seem to be consistently higher than most models:
http://www.hardware.fr/tag/757/taux-retour.html

Although it's certainly nowhere near the return rates you'd see on a drive with major reliability problems. Also, compare it with the hard drive numbers.

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

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

Plus I get the impression if you trace back many of the issues,it seems to be more centred around the time they started aggressively dropping the price on these,and Newegg is pretty large in the US!

The common theme is they go kaput during boot,even if they have been working fine with no issues.

[DanceswithUnix]

I had a Corsair SSD drive fail very early in its life, thanks to it being one of the dodgy Sandforce controller based ones.

I ran the manufacturers utility against it on another PC, which said the firmware was out of date. Reflashed, has been working fine ever since though we don't trust it with anything critical. Makes for a stonking low lag MInecraft server storage

In my case, I later threw away the SATA cable in that PC so wonder if that had been the original problem that pushed the SSD over the edge. Will never know though...