SSD cannot be detected

I have been a huge advocate of Solid State Drives (SSD), for my clients and my own computers I have been quick to jump on the bandwagon of putting an SSD in every computer I can.

OCZ SSD

Since they started being affordable back in 2010 - 2011 I have since upgraded multiple clients to these blistering fast components, as a way to ensure no bottlenecks in new computers and a way of resuscitating old ones. However, out of the multitude of installs performed I have had a few of these components fail usually after a restart of the computer or on boot.

Hopefully you do not see this as much as I have

If you see the error message above or similar and your computer has an SSD as the primary drive, your computer is pretty much screwed. The drive is probably not visible in BIOS, and if you manage to take the drive out and into another computer to double check, you will probably see the drive but it contains no data and is essentially inaccessible. So start digging around for the receipt or proof of purchase to check if it is warranty.

I have mainly been using OCZ, Patriot and Kingston SSD's and have had failures across all brands, I would assume the more expensive Intel produced SSD's will be of higher quality, but it is something to be wary of, in my experience a standard mechanical hard drive purchased today will be more reliable then a low to med quality SSD. In saying that SSD's definitely have their place, if you are going to use in an office environment where no user content is stored on the SSD then happy days, but I would not be storing family photos on one until I am convinced they have become as reliable as the mechanical brethren.

Computer won't Start - Disk Read Error

The worst possible screen when booting up a machine happened to me today.

Simply
Disk Read Error 
Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to Restart

The 250Gb Western Digital drive that was at best estimate 5 years old decided to bite the dust. I usually cycle my drives but this one had slipped past.

Straight away I headed into BIOS to see if the disk is still being recognised, and it was, puzzled I removed the drive and powered up my nexstar hard drive dock and checked the drive, it was working perfectly.

So i began to do what I should have done a while ago, backup the drives contents, the software of choice, Acronis True Image home, this will allow me to restore onto another drive in the future and have the thing be bootable.

Acronis True Image Home 2012


The drive mustn't be dead so it could be a Windows XP issue, (its an old machine) hopefully not as software issues in Windows are more time consuming then failed drives, Windows sort of teases you into thinking you have a chance of resurrecting your Windows install only to find that it would probably have been best to re-install and start from scratch you'll finish that install quicker then solving any lingering registry or missing dll issue you will encounter.


No biggie either way will restore backup back to new drive shortly and hope all will be good.


- Update
Yep the drive was failing only slightly enough that Windows XP couldn't boot and cried a little. As soon as I restored to a new drive Windows XP booted straight in. XP boot process could have tried a little harder to boot in my opinion, but anyways lesson learned drives don't last forever.

Again many thanks to Acronis True Image Home, made it a very simple process.