Solid State Drives (SSD) Fail Different.

By Giles Isham
•
07 Apr, 2021

Over the last few years our team has seen in increase in the number of factories shipping (OEM) computers with Solid State Drives (SSD) as opposed to the traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). We often talk with clients about 20-30x faster read performance and the increased protection from motion induced problems like dropping, bumping, and falling. Normally people with small children and cats know all about those types of failures. Many road warriors are also familiar with cold computers, condensation, and bouncing around in the back of a truck. SSDs don’t suffer from the same type of failures are HDDs, but they also do not suffer failures differently.

Types of HDD Failure –

Electronics Failure (Disk Spins but your computer does not see it)
Motor Failure (Computer sees the drive but the disk does not spin)
Electrical Burn Out (Nothing)
Disk Damage (Super slow performance, missing files, or errors when opening files)

SSDs fail differently. While there are no moving parts or motors, there are still failures you can encounter. There are chips on the board work together to store, retrieve, and maintain your data. When blocks on your SSD start to fail, the controller stops using those parts of a drive as a part of the error correction. You would think there is less to fail because there are no moving parts, but the reality is quite different. Failures are happening all the time on your SSD and they are designed to handle it by using reserved space. When a set of blocks is not usable any more it just uses some “extra” blocks as replacements. In some cases, SSDs are actually designed to fail, and when they fail it looks very different.

Types of SSD Failure –

Electronics Failure (Nothing)
Block Failure (Higher Disk Utilization, slow performance)
Predictive Failure (Blue Screens, Windows Does Not Boot, Files are read only)
Electrical Burn Out (Nothing)
Chip Damage (Nothing)
OTHER

I know you are thinking OTHER, what is that? Well, that is why we are writing this article. We have seen many strange types of failures. We don’t want to over step and say these are normal, but we have seen a lot of strange failures of SSDs that we would not expect. For Example -

SSD Failure that convinces the BIOS there is bad memory and actually fails RAM testing, but is the SSD - Swapping drives, other SSDs, Memory, and further troubleshooting repeatedly proved it.
SSD Failure that is fully accessible, but files are scrambled – Every file was accessible, opened, Windows booted fine, but every file opened is gibberish.
SSD Failure where the drive tests as good, but whole sections of the file structure are missing

While there are super techy explanations for each of these failures that cover NAND failure, Electrical impedance, and reserve block management. For example, sections of an SSD can go bad. If a section goes bad, Windows may be in a good section, but a whole section with your files may have failed.

The bottom line is SSDs and HDDs have a finite life time. Modern SSDs will normally out last the computer they are installed in, but when they fail, they can be the source of some interesting and frustrating problems.

Don’t worry! We can help!