So I've got a SanDisk SSD (3.5yrs old), 2TB Seagate (7yo), 2*3TB Toshibas (3/4yo) and a 10TB Seagate (2 months old) and shock horror the SSD died first.
A bit of warning for others if your SSD is acting sluggish.
I've accepted I've lost my data but now have to go through the fun of getting permission to those old drives as I've reinstalled windows.
I had HD Tune Pro. I only glanced over it as I was expecting it to last…
RiP for all the unwanted junk that were sitting in c:\windows\ :)
my Linux ISOs :(
be careful with SSD because it has limited read-write.
If you it for temporary folder and the file paging, it will significantly reduce the life span.
Hmm TIL about file paging. Thanks.
I do have firefox too… I was running at about 40gb free of about 240gb so that might have been it.
what is filepaging, i use my ssd for os and everything else
From what I remember, excess RAM info gets stored on the primary drives. There are a limited number of writes that you can put on ssd's before they die.
I've only 8gb RAM and 30gb of SSD space, so those writes killed it potentially.
@Caped Baldy: oh wow.. i also heard it's harder to recover from ssd than hdd? did you learn about that
@capslock janitor: A bit more on file paging here - https://www.howtogeek.com/126430/htg-explains-what-is-the-wi…
Yeah, my research said that it's near impossible to extract from an ssd. The ssd wasn't even recognised in BIOS and I don't think it's easily possible to replace the ssd header(?) connection.
My system was going awfully slow for the preceding few weeks so keep an eye out and prepare a back up. I naively, thought since it was an SSD the lifespan would outlive my spinny disks.
All the low end SSD usually die within a few years. It's easy to get them replaced though. You need to buy a larger one and use it less because of the TBW issue (which is an average - so depending on the distribution you may end up with around half of the people failing much earlier). I use mine as a scratch disk and to clone VMs; they have failed quite consistently with free replacements.
Did you have a power failure before it happened? If so there is a trick to get it working again but you'll have lost all your data.
… how do you get free replacements?
Interested to know to
Under warranty, make sure you undersize it and use it a lot.
Full Clone VM every few days to get past trial software and Video Editing is around 40-60GB writen per day. Move browser to scratch disk and set cache in firefox to be dumped on exit. A lot of other things you can do as well. Usually when it dies the smart data is gone too. The whole thing goes poof.
@sharka: VMware Workstation. It's inbuilt. I find linked clones usually break down or become laggy over time. So I don't really have a choice but to do the more disk intensive activities…
isn't that too soon? :(
I have a 60GB cheap Drevo X1 SSD on laptop which is still going strong for around 4 years now.
I usually keep pagefile on HDD though (but usually it is not that much used due to RAM availability).
I didn't even know about page filing before :(
My Sandisk SSD is 6.5 years old so looks like it may die any day now.
Is Hard Disk Sentinel reliable? It says estimated remaining lifetime > 1000 days
Mine was really sluggish. I'd copy out important files and try and get a replacement ssd to clone to.
Mine is doing this too at the moment.
What would you use for backup?
I had a spare 120gb ssd so am using that for now.
Use the computer sparingly.
Copy your important files.
Buy an SSD and install it alongside your existing - you'll need a spare sata cable.
Download some hard drive cloning software eg easeus.
Transfer your system over. Instructions should be straight forward..
Turn off the computer and unplug the old SSD and plug in the new SSD. This should save you going into BIOS to reassign the boot drive.
Prepare for a failure in the future - copy of files, list of software, backup browser bookmarks, passwords, sync files to the cloud
went through a hdd failure (internal clicking) i realized how fragile these things are, luckily i had online backup, now all on ssd but planning on going extra NAS
What software did you use to monitor hard drive health?