How SSD power faults scramble your data

Night Hawk said:

The power button was set for sleep not shutdown and the kids would simply close the lid after hitting the power button where each day the F8 was coming up. You have to wonder if seeing that setting changed on your friend's laptop could be a help in preventing the irregular power outages since the battery is constantly draining when not shutdown fully.

He uses Hibernation.

His problem is physical.
When he is using his machine, it will lose power if he moves it a certain way (i.e. if he picks it up by the left side using one hand).

Sounds like a loose connection or bad spot on either a connection(cold solder point) or possibly a crack in the main board if the laptop has been banged around a bit?! I would tend to suspect a cold solder point or loose connection is where to begin looking however. The connections for the battery would be where to start as well as the power switch.

Now for an effective backup a full system images provides you the OS as well as all of the programs as the primary backup. For individual files and folders regular manual copy and paste to a second drive or data tossed onto removable medial like data dvds is a common thought as well as simply downloading multiple copies for each item to be stored locally on C for ready access as well as storing a second download of same on a storage drive.

Why copy and paste? That's simple simce you can backup each item on the spot as you go along while when going to restore a regular scheduled backup or full image you only bring back what was included at the time the backup or image was created. The daily incremental manual backups do far more to guaranty all files are safe in the event of any mishap.

Night Hawk said:

Sounds like a loose connection or bad spot on either a connection(cold solder point) or possibly a crack in the main board if the laptop has been banged around a bit?! I would tend to suspect a cold solder point or loose connection is where to begin looking however. The connections for the battery would be where to start as well as the power switch.

I agree with your assessment (my friend and I worked as electronic repair technicians). :)

He has a long warranty, but he is too addicted to using his machine to send it "back to the shop" for repairs.

Lee said:

I have two SSDs one is four years old and has been through at least five brown outs without any problem (Intel 25 M 80 Gig). The other one (SanDisk Extreme 240 Gig) is one year old and has been through one brown out without any problem. . .knock on wood (being my house is built from logs). . .

The article brings up a list of vulnerabilities while it shouldn't be taken that all SSDs would be effected on this alone. I think that this type of problem will tend to be more individualized rather then effecting all drives on any type of a large scale. It simply cautions however that this is something to keep in mind.

lehnerus2000 said:

Night Hawk said:

Sounds like a loose connection or bad spot on either a connection(cold solder point) or possibly a crack in the main board if the laptop has been banged around a bit?! I would tend to suspect a cold solder point or loose connection is where to begin looking however. The connections for the battery would be where to start as well as the power switch.

I agree with your assessment (my friend and I worked as electronic repair technicians). :)

He has a long warranty, but he is too addicted to using his machine to send it "back to the shop" for repairs.

That won't help any! It's just like my old Vista case is apparently having a problem after seeing a new board, supply, drive all go in to get it running again and suddenly a month after replacing the main drive Windows has troubles installing with hangs?

My friend wouldn't pull out the case so I could through it checking individual things as well as not using his usb hub which is suspect as well as the optical since both Vista dvd and usb install key methods failed. XP was finally installed with problems and no internet yet however. I still need to know why neither dvd or flash drive attempts failed however.

With 5 WD 1tb drives(mechanical) I guess I can knock on wood as well as the next not having seen any big problem after an early heavy snow storm knocked power out for nearly a week as well as other 3-4hr. interruptions over the last several years. The supply and board had gone belly up on the last case(2008-10) however while the big one hit in 2011.

UPSs do have issues at times! On that I can agree when looking into them and what I was finding. As for frequent backups that is the course of wisdom many often forget however. And then the day comes when something goes wrong and... "my data!"

When downloading anything when possible I download more then one copy of each thing in case of a bad download as well as having a backup since one goes to a folder on the main drive while each other will go to an identical folder on each of the two storage drives. Incrementally backing things as you go along works hand in hand with creating full system images when possible for the OS and all programs.

Now when going to run that first download and it fails that gets dumped and I simply copy one of the other downloads over if not launching it from the other drive. Not everything is stored long time on the main drive however. That will depend on just what it is.

As for outages in general I don't live in an area prone to seeing many. Of the few seen over the last several years most are only for a few hours only. A couple of good size too early in season snow storms with ice and heavy snow blew out a main transformer back on Oct 31, '11 that lasted for nearly a full week being a rare incident.

The heavy snow came while the leaves were still on the trees bringing lines down as well. 2010 however saw other areas hit with severe ice and outages lasting weeks here in the northeastern corner of the country. Trees split in half coming down on houses at times. The hilly moutainous areas see the bulk of damages as a general rule.

Now for an SSD or mechanical the same rule of thought about frequent backups should apply. Having a disaster recovery plan is what would be emphasized. With SSDs however you are dealing with the static memory over the magnetic coating on platters seen with mechanical drives.

Static memory is obviously more sensitive to certain conditions while gaps in the coating on platters produce bad sectors on mechanical drives. Wear on read/write heads and the armature also result in a drive fail while fluxuations of current and sudden dropoffs like blackouts could corrupt data on any drive not just SSDs but which tend to be more susceptible. The worst enemy for any drive or simply for hardware in general would be a heftly line surge or lightning strike which would send a surge through at times.

A defective component like a bad cap in a supply shorting things out when pushing a few extra amps into the board can cause all types of problems not just with drives where at time they actually survive while the supply and board may fail completely! The last build saw an old supply take the board with it without harm to anything else. The first board and supply for this build saw the supply go belly up and trip a 20A ac wall out right through the surge protection even as well as cooking the new board ordered with it! Fortunately all drives as well as data survived when the replacement MB was the exact same make and model.

So the Golden Rule of Thought for the day is simply backing up the backups made of the backup of the backups of the backup(s) made of the backup of the... Sometimes those old data disks just had to be tossed since you could no longer even read what files were originally burned on them when either upgrading systems or the OS or both which was usually the case. For each technology you have to be prepared for whatever setbacks are possible and simply put "be prepared"!

I think you may find some have tried working with SSD arrays over trying to mix drive types. The two primary drawbacks here are 1) much higher price 2) small capacity drives

When planning the present case out I wanted drive capacity as well as trying 7 out on a Sata III drive and still going back to a Sata II after a second clean install was needed. That came up from changing brands of memory to get the 1.5v memory needed while I was able to recycle the 1.9v memory by using that for another new build at the time to run the 64bit Home Premium.

Now that SSD capacities have grown up as far as 1tb which is the size of the four HDs Sata II and III drives presently in use it may a consideration for the next build at some point. Personally this one is set up just where it needs to be and is working well enough to simply run it for some time still. The latest Octocore cpus? A little faster seeing 4.2ghz might be a consideration? Or might not be either since a quad core 3.4ghz model suffices thank you!

For the next build or eventually on this one possibly I would still be seeing the twin primary storage drives as well as a second drive for images from the host as well as trying out different OSs on the front end of it. The idea even for mechanical drives is one backs up the other since the second storage drive originally saw system images stored there waiting to see what the next would look like following 7 for the second drive. 8 flopped!

At this time knowing that the next version won't work out the second OS drive can now be bumped to the image storage role and an SSD could replace the present 7 host drive in theory which would then still see the present 7 host drive turned into either another second OS test drive once again or a second drive for storing even more system images? Then the test of how an SSD would work here would begin.