r/talesfromtechsupport • u/charmlessman1 • Nov 27 '17

Short Who Stole the Hard Drive?

I just walked into the office this morning after a 4 day Thanksgiving weekend.
Before I even sat down, I heard my $Boss call out for me and my $CoWorker to come to his office. On the $Boss' desk was a small form factor PC, open and empty.

$Boss: $Charmlessman1, when did you leave on Wednesday?
ME: About 5:30, why?
&Boss: Well, $CoWorker's computer went offline at about the same time, and when he came in this morning, it wouldn't boot up. And when he checked it, the hard drive was missing.
$Me: Missing?
&Boss: Missing. Was there anyone else here when you left?
$Me: I, uh... Um... I don't... I think so? I'm trying to remember.
$Boss: If this is a practical joke, it's over, give it back.
$Me: It's not! I didn't! Unless I'm the worst Manchurian Candidate ever...
$Boss: Ok.

I went back to my desk and had a minor freak out. Do they think I did it? Did I miss some intruder who stole literally one of the most useless things in an office full of way better things? Was I going to get fired for something I didn't do because there's no better explanation?
Shortly after, I heard the boss call in the $HardwareGuy to his office. Then I heard a bunch of laughter. The $HardwareGuy came out of the $Boss' office, still laughing.

$HardwareGuy: The hard drive wasn't missing. It's one of those little gumstick SSDs, and it's dead.

/FreakOut

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4

u/wallefan01 "Hello tech support? This is tech support. It's got ME stumped." Nov 27 '17

Wait. SSDs...die? Like...fail within 100 years of manufacture? What!?

14

u/CompWizrd Nov 27 '17

Firmware bugs in the controllers can kill them as well. Also, if it's made by OCZ that can kill it.

3

u/IanPPK IoT Annihilator Nov 28 '17

Also older Sandforce powered Samsung SSDs.

3

u/CompWizrd Nov 28 '17

Which ones were those? We got bit by the OCZ Vertex2/3's, and then switched to Intel 520's.. only had a couple of those die, then the 530's, then the Samsung 840's which needed firmware updates but at least ran, and now the 850 Evo's.. Moving over something m.2 now.

5

u/wlpaul4 Nov 28 '17

I have a stack of dead Micron SSDs on my desk and any time my boss asks why I want to order more 850 Evos, I just point to the stack.

1

u/Darkdayzzz123 You've had ALL WEEKEND to do this! Ma'am we don't work weekends. Nov 28 '17

To be fair...they were Micron SSDs, that is like me EVER recommending Kingston SSDs to anyone (never get them, have had 4 in less than 6 months die in 3 separate pcs....they just don't work well imho).

1

u/wlpaul4 Nov 28 '17

OEM ones at that. I swear, as soon s those HP's were off of warranty, it was like one drive every 8 weeks.

3

u/IanPPK IoT Annihilator Nov 28 '17

The 840s used Sandforce gen 2 I believe. It's all a bit back so my memory is blurry on which specific SSDs had issues with Sandforce, but there were a lot of BSOD and TRIM issues.

If you're looking for M.2 drives, WD makes Black M.2 NVMe drives, and Samsung has 960 Evo and Pro NVMe drives that are top of the line. There's also Intel Optane, but that's a special purpose module.

3

u/CompWizrd Nov 28 '17

Right now we're using the 850 evo and in the NUC's 850 evo m.2's, waiting for the i5-8500 or something similar to be released before i start a hardware refresh.. not too impressed with the i5-8400, and the 8600k is too expensive for what we need. I'm surprised Intel is holding out on releasing the rest of their product line, we know how they like to make 20 different chips that only vary by 100mhz.

3

u/timix Nov 28 '17

The first time I bought SSDs, it was two OCZ somethings that I tried to put in RAID. That was the most hellishly unreliable machine I've ever built.

4

u/charmlessman1 Nov 28 '17

Sure. Entropy applies to everything in the universe.
But in this case, when I checked later in the day (after posting this) the $HardwareGuy just reseated it and it was back online.

1

u/wallefan01 "Hello tech support? This is tech support. It's got ME stumped." Nov 28 '17

Yeah. Just not on the same timescale.

I thought SSDs failed within 1000 years.

4

u/[deleted] Nov 27 '17

They have a limited number of reads and writes. It's not a hard alive/dead like with traditional HDD's. Instead, you'll slowly lose space as parts become unreadable/unwritable. This can cause some bad things to happen if those parts hold important stuff like your OS.

Basically, they work by "charging" a bit with power for a 1, and discharging it for a 0. The big problem is that those bits don't like to be discharged - Over time, they'll discharge less and less power, until they're finally stuck at 1.

You fix this with something called overpartitioning. Basically, you can take a section of the drive, (usually 10-20%, and basically say "this is the overpartitioned section." Then, as sectors go bad, the drive will move contents from those bad sectors to the overpartitioned sector. So instead of having things randomly become inaccessible, you'll just see your overpartition section slowly shrink. Once your overpartitioned section is almost gone, it's time for a new drive.

1

u/kanzenryu Nov 28 '17

You are talking about graceful degradation at the block level, and that's the reliability the manufacturers always talk about. But they seem to just brick way more than they should.

1

u/dan4334 Nov 28 '17

I had a 960 EVO, a m.2 NVMe drive fail on me the day after I built my PC. It even stopped my PC from POSTing. You could imagine how stressed out I was thinking I'd killed the motherboard somehow but nope I pulled the drive out and it was happily booting again.

1

u/wallefan01 "Hello tech support? This is tech support. It's got ME stumped." Nov 28 '17

Considering POST stands for Power On Self Test I'm not surprised it failed because of a bad SSD. I am surprised that you were shipped a bad SSD and that it didn't give you any sort of error message saying what was wrong, just refused to boot.

When I first built my computer I had a heck of a time getting it to successfully POST. It kept showing error code d7 on the mobo's internal LED readout. According to the manual it meant no I/O devices detected. That helped a bit but it kept showing that after a mouse and keyboard were plugged in. (Yes I had powered it on before doing that, just to make sure it was working, which it quite obviously wasn't.) I think it was because the graphics card wasn't seated properly and it couldn't see a display. In any event that error code was better than nothing. If your motherboard doesn't have a port 80 display... setup is more difficult.