[GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures

[Howard Gibson]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2019 11:15:43 -0400 (EDT)
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> 
> Two years ago one of the m.2 SATA SSDs suddenly stopped working.  If I 
> remember correctly, it didn't even show up as a disk.
> 
> Last week the same thing happened on the second notebook.
> 
> The only warning was that a few days earlier the firmware forgot what
> to boot.  I easily fixed that by telling it again.  This could easily
> have been a CMOS battery problem but I guess it wasn't.
> 
> The computer acted as if the drive were not there.  I installed it in a
> different machine and it was not detected in the other machine either.
> The firmware ("BIOS" is not the correct term) on both machines failed
> to see it.  A live Fedora system (booted off a USB stick) failed to
> see it.  It's dead, Jim.
> 
> Lesson: SSDs don't give you warning about failures.  Much worse (in my
> modest experience) than HDDs.  Backup now.  I'm skeptical about
> S.M.A.R.T. for SSDs.

Hugh,

   When I bought a hard drive at Best Buy, I asked about SSDs.  I understand that there is a maximum number of writes you can do to them, and the number is rather small.  I was buying a backup drive that runs at night while I am in bed, so I went for cheap and reliable.

-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgibson at eol.ca
jhowardgibson at gmail.com
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson