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I've been using a WD external spinner as a 'data drive' for the last 2 years. Up to now, it's worked great, mostly plugged into my main system, but also travelling with the laptop as needed...such as yesterday. This morning when plugging it in to my main system, Windows complains that it is unreadable or corrupted! 
I'm now scanning it with Defender (going on 2 hours now) as a preliminary to trying anything else. The 'Estimated time remaining' got down to < 11 minutes (about an hour in) but has since been increasing as the number of files scans flies past 2.5M. 
I intend to try chkdsk once the Defender scan is complete...if it ever does. (time remaining still climbing)
So, back to the subject line. Given the current price/GB, performance, and reliability of SSDs, I highly doubt that I will ever buy another spinner. Even if I'm able to recover the current drive, I don't trust it anymore and will be replacing it asap.
Question: Has anyone here actually experienced a failure with an SSD? Just last year, I retired my first one (64GB Patriot) after 5 years as a server OS drive, not due to failure, but as part of the server upgrade. Personally, I've not had any issues whatsoever with them.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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kmoorevs wrote: Question: Has anyone here actually experienced a failure with an SSD?
Yo (Yes and No).
No because the laptop continues working as always, no performace lost, no error messages or whatever I would say it is having problems. Several checks successful, diagnostic tools found nothhing...
But yes, because I don't know why (and I have tested a lot of things) I can't do a successfull image anymore. I mean:
Same SSD has been in Lappie, since I gave it to my wife. I have done my standard procedure a couple of years (meaning... restore image once or twice a year, updating what needed to be updated and doing a new image to restore from next time). But somewhen some months ago... it stop restoring from the backups. I can do them, they are OK if I scan with the ghost emulator, but every try I have made to restore has been unsuccessfull.
I now sync the data partition with external drive every X days, but System partition is "in the wild mode"
Same SSD serie (a bigger model) is on my pc and nothing...
kmoorevs wrote: Up to now, it's worked great, mostly plugged into my main system, but also travelling with the laptop as needed...such as yesterday. This morning when plugging it in to my main system, Windows complains that it is unreadable or corrupted!
I have had similar messages randomally after using the USB-Drives in other system.
Win 7 offers to "check", "restore" or "do nothing". I select "do nothing", save content to the pc, do a fast format... message is gone next time I plug the stick in.
With tiny USBs, no issue, with bigger ones I just keep hitting the "do nothing" until I have time, mood and space to move the content to another place so I can do a fast format.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Didn't Richard Nixon once store a short audio clip on one?
modified 8-Dec-19 14:20pm.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: Didn't Richard Nixon once store a short audio clip on one?
Not sure the drive would have the failure in that case! 
BTW, I have HRC's private email server in my basement.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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A few ideas:
If you look for a reliable SSD, take a long hard look at the Samsung Pro series (not their EVO drives). The pro series make use of a slightly different technology, that is proprietary to Samsung as far as I know, and that is supposed to live longer than the regular SSD drives. They are, however, more expensive.
I have had two SSDs fail utterly over the past six or so years. They do not have an unlimited number of write cycles before failing, but I have never had a Samsung Pro fail on me.
I also firmly believe in WD Black drives for spinning disks, and had just a couple develop bad sectors over the years. However, you have a good chance of recovering most of the drive when you run chckdsk /r. I have never been able to recover a bad SSD in this way. When they die they die good!
Best of luck!
modified 8-Dec-19 13:49pm.
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 Thanks, just the type info I was looking for.
Indeed, chkdsk /f recovered the drive and contents. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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kmoorevs wrote: Question: Has anyone here actually experienced a failure with an SSD?
Not yet, but one of the three should be close to failing.
All three are mostly used for reading; installed applications on there. For data I use pendrives, attached to the router. Cheap and easy to replace, and the SSD's live longer if you don't write that often.
Still got a 1Tb spinner in the main machine - it's a gaming machine built by someone who is good at that stuff. The spinners work well in an environment that doesn't involve moving them. If it moves, you want a drive without moving parts.
Did not get the RAID-pendrives working yet. Once it does, it won't be very fast, since it is limited by a USB2 hub. In the end, that's where I want my data
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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kmoorevs wrote: Question: Has anyone here actually experienced a failure with an SSD?
Yeah, my work laptop always had an SSD C drive and a HDD D drive.
When I quit my job I bought the laptop and it had to be formatted.
After that I only had a C drive, but I didn't think much of it (I just thought I had multiple partitions before, which were now removed to one big partition).
However, my laptop often failed to start after that and when it did it took minutes instead of the usual seconds.
Every morning was a struggle to start the laptop...
So I called Dell support and it turned out my old C was an SSD and my new C was the HDD.
The SSD got busted for some reason and never could be read after the format.
A Dell engineer replaced it (just within the warranty!) and I never had issues again.
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I've read the MTBF on SSDs was something like 20 years, but for HDDs it was only like 5.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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That would depend a lot on what you use them for.
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I'm sure it does. I think that was an average for consumer use.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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The problem is that they wear out in different ways.
For SSDs they should call it MWBF instead. (Mean Writes Before Failure)
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That's true but MTBF accounts for that in its own way. Obviously the causes are different, but failure is failure for the purposes of this. With modern tech, including advance wear leveling, you get about 20 years out of a drive before your writes fail.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I believe the introduction of static wear levelling was the game changer for SSDs
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Next time, run chkdsk /f before defender. If you have bad sectors you want to mess with them as little as possible before taking an image.
In my experience, the upside with classic spinners is that they generally do warn you, before giving up for good. SSDs tend to just die without any warning at all.
This doesn't stop me from using them though, rather the opposite. But I still use classic spinners for long term storage and any type of transaction log.
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Quote: But I still use classic spinners for long term storage and any type of transaction log
Ditto! And for storing drive images in a normally disconnected drive.
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Can't say I've had a fatal failure yet [*] but every time I hear about SSD failures, the story pretty much ends with the statement that the data is pretty much completely unrecoverable, unlike spinning disks.
[*] My only experience so far with a failing SSD goes back to my first one, a 64GB Kingston. Not that it contained any data I care about, but suddenly one day, as I wanted to repurpose it, I found out it refused to delete the existing partition and let me start over. Nothing I tried, in fact, managed to delete the partition or just reformat it.
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Quote: Nothing I tried, in fact, managed to delete the partition
Are you familiar with (the dangerous utility) Diskpart? Next time run the Diskpart command 'clean' on the drive. If that does not knock the drive back to what it was before it had its first partition, etc., nothing will work. By the way: Diskpart is not for the faint of heart!
modified 8-Dec-19 16:14pm.
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Cp-Coder wrote: Next time run the Diskpart command 'clean' on the drive. If that does not knock the drive back to what it was before it had its first partition, etc., nothing will work.
the "dban" boot cd can do that kind of job pretty good too
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I'm not familiar with that, but the nice part about Diskpart is that it is an integral part of Windows. You can invoke it with a Powershell command.
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mmmhhh... good to know.
DBan is the best option for "paranoia-modus"
There are several levels, in the most paranoic one, it writes the full disk with encrypted junk, deletes the content and then overwrites it again with NULL-Bytes, that X times in a loop.
I once didn't check the options correctly and had to wait almost 3 days until it was done. I didn't want to cancel, just in case it would make the disk unreadable due to something not correctly ended
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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"Dangerous"? Please...
The problem with diskpart, with this drive, is that it's not low-level enough (if that's even possible). I've tried much more advanced utilities, including the drive's own manufacturer's. Even DBAN (as others below this message have suggested) couldn't make much of it (I forget exactly how it failed, but the partition is still there...)
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I've had two external HDDs "fail".
In both cases, it was the rinky-dink PCBs in the enclosures that failed. The drives were fine.
Don't do anything drastic until you've taken them out of the enclosures and physically mounted them somewhere else.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I did experience an SSD failure a few years ago, when they were relatively new on the market. I haven't experienced one since.
I have had a few HDDs fail me over the years.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Okay so I was kind of surprised this compiled:
if (null == default(T)) _array[_head] = default(T);
Where T is a generic type parameter
The reason I thought it wouldn't is because T can be a value type.
It's too bad I don't know if that operation boxes or not. It's kind of important. Now I have to disassemble just to know the spec on it. You should never have to do that, especially for a language that is supposed to be standardized, because if there's no standard for that behavior then different implementations are free to implement it how they like.
Maybe it's in the spec and it got buried, but I can't find it to save my life. Grrr.
Edit: Yes, it causes the default(T) to be boxed  (at least in MS's DNF implementation)
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
modified 8-Dec-19 10:12am.
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