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Ken Mingis

Mingis on Macs

My new SSD died, dare I try another?

15 comments

TAGS:MacBook; SSD; OCZ; Mingis
IT TOPICS:Laptops & Netbooks, Macintosh & Apple, Storage

Last month I coughed up just under $300 for a 120GB OCZ Apex solid-state disk (SSD) drive for my new MacBook. Worked like a charm. Installation was a breeze and I immediately saw much snappier performance.

And then on Saturday, as a I settled in for a relaxing cup of coffee and an early morning surf on the screen porch, the drive suddenly -- and completely -- failed. I awoke the MacBook from its overnight sleep, and noticed everything was frozen. Dead giveaway: the menubar clock wasn't even working. I did a hard restart and when the MacBook fired up again, the hard drive was no longer available. Gone. Kaput.

I tried to reinstall Mac OS X from the DVD that came with the laptop. No SSD, no go. I dashed out to Best Buy to snag a replacement drive -- a Western Digital Scorpio 320GB 7,200-rpm model -- stuck it in the MacBook, installed OS X and reinstalled my files from a recent Time Machine backup. (It wasn't recent enough to save the last episode of 30 Rock, alas.)

Reminder: Back up your files, early and often.

I tried one more time to bring the OCZ drive back to life, popping it into an external USB drive enclosure. When I tried to reformat it using Apple's Disk Utility app, all I got was an "input/output error" message. (Storage guru Lucas Mearian posits that it's a controller issue.)

I have to say Amazon.com was pretty quick on getting a replacement drive to me, even before I'd sent the bad one back. So I took the Scorpio drive out, stuck it in the external enclosure, put the new OCZ drive in the MacBook and I'm again enjoying SSD goodness. (The Scorpio is a nice drive, by the way. It offers more than twice the space at less than half the cost. All that's missing is the SSD pop I've grown to like.)

Obviously, since I got a replacement OCZ drive, I'm proceeding on the assumption that I got a bad drive. My early-adopter faith in SSDs isn't shaken yet; dead drives happen. Still, I'll be backing up my data even more often than usual for the foreseeable future -- just in case.

But if this one craps out on me, too, I may have to rethink this whole SSD paradigm, at least until the early issues are resolved. Either way, I'll let you know what happens.

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SSD

Submitted by james braselton on July 31, 2009 - 2:14 P.M.

HI THERE I ORDER MY SSD OR HDD WHEN I BUY MY COMPUTERS I BASCALY USE THERE COMPONITS SENCE APPLE DELL ALIEN WARE SONY HARD CORE COMPUTERS CALLED THE REACTOR THEY ALL USE SAMSUNG SSD AND I WOULD RECOMAND YOU USE THERE COMPOINTS BUY THE SSD WITH THE COMPUTER THATS PROBALY WHAT CUASED THE PROBLEMS WITH NON COMPNITS FROM THE COMPUTER CORPERATION THATS WHY I ADVOID MODIFING MY COMPUTER

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SSD drive failures

Submitted by Drew on June 5, 2009 - 4:54 P.M.

Over the past few months we have already received an increase in SSD drives for recovery. Some people are under the impression that because there are no spinning platters in SSD drives and because of the Nand Flash Technology used for data storage in SSD drives, that therefore the drives would not fail. But this of course is not true and backing up your data is still very much a necessity.

Best regards,

Drew
Data Analyzers Data Recovery

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So what ?

Submitted by Anonymous on May 20, 2009 - 5:09 A.M.

Don't you know anything about hardware ??
If something dies, it will be in the first 2 or three weeks, or after the MTBF.
If your SSD keeps working for more then 3 weeks, then there is absolutely no need to backup more often !!!!!
I thought you asked an "expert" ?
Please inform yourself next time, before posting such nonesense.

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OCZ?

Submitted by Anonymous on May 5, 2009 - 9:21 P.M.

Why OCZ? Personally, I'll never buy anything from them again. Twice I bought memory modules from them and twice I had to return them.

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OCZ

Submitted by Ken Mingis on May 6, 2009 - 7:25 A.M.

Actually, I went with OCZ after talking with our storage expert, Lucas Mearian, who's done a lot of testing of SSDs. Now, having said that, it certainly seems that Intel is pretty much the trend-setter here. But its drives are also more expensive. It's a cost-benefit issue. (Of course, if the OCZ drives prove to be problematic over the long haul, there's not much benefit.)

Ken Mingis, Managing Editor, News, Computerworld

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Lots of issues with SSDs

Submitted by Anonymous on May 5, 2009 - 11:46 A.M.

SSDs are not "there" yet unless you pay premium price for an Intel drive. Even then, what OSes are optimized to take advantage of them? None, really.

The biggest problem with the "cheap" SSDs is the write times. They stutter and slow you down on numerous small file writes. This is mainly a controller firmware issue. These drives have been pushed out the door without optimized controller firmware or OS driver optimizations.

I'll wait. Your Scorpio is a faster drive for writes, by a long shot. If you study up on what an SSD actually does when you replace a file, you'll see why the stuttering happens. It has to go thru a several stage process to free up space and write the file. With a lot of small files (something Windows does all the time) you get stuttering and slowdowns. They may be fine and fast for reads, but they're dogs for writes after you've used them for a while.

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yes they are

Submitted by Robert on May 5, 2009 - 11:15 P.M.

Actually, there are some bad drive on the market, the ones that use the jmicron controller.

But so what, you can probably find some really old, slow, sata drives too.

You say SSD's aren't there yet, unless you buy the intel.

Well BUY THE INTEL.

Thats what I did, wow...you cannot go back, first of all write IOPS on the intel are an order of magnituted greater than that scorpio drive.

Even sustained writes are fairly fast.

I use my SSD's for database work, there is just no comparision, these are so amazingly fast...

I just wonder what it would take to get you to realize these drives are there, now!

A more clear cut open and shut case rarely happens in this life.

Go buy the intel, or anything based on the indilinx controller...OCZ Vertex is acceptable.

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Well, I would, but.....

Submitted by Anonymous on May 6, 2009 - 9:34 A.M.

They're way too expensive. When the high-performance SSDs come down in price I will consider it.

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how many thousands of times

Submitted by Anonymous on May 30, 2009 - 2:43 A.M.

how many thousands of times do I have to read useless posts like this one. If it's too expensive for YOU, then don't buy it.

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Intel

Submitted by Ken Mingis on May 6, 2009 - 7:27 A.M.

Agreed that Intel is the best option, and I may eventually have to suck down the price. Vertex seems to be OCZ's higher end SSD, and does seem like an option.
So far, FWIW, Apex no. 2 is holding its own.
Ken Mingis, Managing Editor, News, Computerworld

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