SSDs - a cautionary tale

[paulsl]

I do hope this is preaching to choir

I updated my PC over Christmas including a new motherboard with SATA 3. This finally made the 256Gb SSD I had finally fly. Sadly Windows 7 couldn't cope with the changed motherboard and had to be totally rebuilt. Sigh! All that stuff to be re-registered. Nevertheless off we went and all was sweetness and light until last weekend when the SSD suffered a failure. I mean Failure, Catastrophic; even the BIOS couldn't recognise it. I can't tell you what I said - the sailors in the forum would blush.

After the rebuild I'd invested in Acronis TrueImage 2015 and had been making regular backups. So, out with the SSD, in with the 500gb HD that it had replaced (ages ago and I couldn't bear to throw away). Full partition restore and less than two hours after losing the C: drive completely I was up and running and back to normal. The only problems were having to re-activate MS Office and reload the motherboard drivers.

The morals of the story are

• 1) when your SSD goes it' gonna go big time
  2) get a decent backup program that can do partition backups and
  3) if you want to minimise downtime, keep a replacement disc of the same or larger capacity on hand.

Personally, I can't recommend Acronis highly enough. There are others out there of varying price. My experience is get the best you can afford, The hours I spent installing stuff was easily repayed by the ease of recovering from near disaster.

There you go, end of sermon.

Paul

[Paul K]

The day I have to do a significant upgrade is on the horizon - distant, but definitely visible. Your cautionary tale is noted, Paul.

[Dev One]

Mine hiccuped (not a complete failure luckily) on me a few months back & I bought a 120 Gb Samsung 840 EVO. It comes complete with transfer software & selects suitable settings for use as the C drive - that seems to be the important bit to stop rewrites every few minutes as is M$ wont.
I placed all my other programmes & files onto a 1Tb HDD, all right it takes a bit of time to load FSX, but thats not too much a problem. The main killer of SSD's is the number of times it can be written to, as noted elsewhere in the site. I keep backups onto various USB sticks & when I remember onto another smaller 60Gb SSD. BTW running W8.1.
Thats my setup at the mo & touching wood, seems to be OK.
Keith

[Airspeed]

Daddy......what's a backup?

Daddy, is a SSD a supersonic dinosaur?

[paulsl]

Keith,

the idea of that transfer software sounds good. I'd check if you have to replace like with like though. I got away with an old HD I had. I'd have had a lot more downtime if to get another OCZ 256Gb SSD. The question of writes is interesting. I was just thinking about using symbolic links to move %APPDATA% to a different drive when the stoopid thing failed. Now I have the old clunker, it being a noisy little B, it's quite a revelation how much access is going on 'behind the scenes'.

Mike,

I did say I hoped I was preaching to the choir. My point was that your chosen software needs to be doing partition or sector backups. If you have to restore the C: drive, file level backups aren't going to cut it.

Paul