Dead SSD

My computer was on, but I was elsewhere. When I came back it had rebooted and was giving me the "no os" error. I went into the bios and my 60gb OCZ Agility SSD wasn't showing up on the list of drives. I tried moving it to my secondary drive's cables, but still no-go. I pulled the drive and put it one of the Icy Dock enclosures that I had won at LanOC. Both Windows and Linux didn't want anything to do with it. So now I'm at the mercy of OCZ support. With under 2 weeks til the LAN, I'm hoping they have a quick swap option.

Hmmm, should of gone with Intel? j/k.

Waiting to see how long this takes. Doing a build this week with a 30gb OCZ SSD. Hopefully everything works out Chris. Once you go SSD its hard to go back.

Yea, the thought had crossed my mind to install windows on the first partition of my 2tb HDD. Nahh, last resort.

I was doing a little research into it the other day and SSD life spans are pretty much a joke in general, regardless of the brand. Hopefully by the time I upgrade they'll start improving on that.

That's fine and it's great that they warranty it, but it still sucks when it happens to you and renders your computer temporarily unusable. It would suck even more if it happened at a LAN. Then again, I guess that's why they invented fault-tolerant RAID5 setups, which is what I'll hopefully be using when I upgrade.

Raid = A bitch lol.

Never used it but that's what i've heard. If I was going to do it over again. Drobo all the way. Easy is the best way for anything, well most everything.

Yeah, Drobo is just a hardware RAID5 setup. Software RAID could get a bit tricky, I won't deny that.

If you do RAID 5 and are looking for long-term reliability, make sure you buy 2 RAID cards as well. They are also susceptible to failure. What if down the road it dies and they don't make them anymore. Then you're really stuck, trying to figure out how to read the data from the drives.

Nacelle wrote: If you do RAID 5 and are looking for long-term reliability, make sure you buy 2 RAID cards as well. They are also susceptible to failure. What if down the road it dies and they don't make them anymore. Then you're really stuck, trying to figure out how to read the data from the drives.

Wouldn't doing software raid through Windows avoid this problem altogether?

I'm not sure. I would first test that out by moving the drives to another system and seeing if you can read from them there.

I'm using a Linux Software RAID-5 and have a 6tb array with one hot spare that will automatically be used when a drive fails. Extremely easy to setup and will send me an email alert / text message any time there is a RAID event. I've seen so many hardware RAID controllers fail that if you are just deadset on using hardware, you absolutely need to do what Nacelle said and get multiple controllers (and never update the firmware unless you do it to both). To me it's not worth the money for minimal speed gains (and there is no feature gain, if you're using Linux).

Last bit of RAID advice, make sure you have something scheduled weekly or so to go through and do a full file scan. Many RAID-5's still end up failing after one drive goes bad because the other drives may be on the threshold of doing the same. The process of rebuilding the array may just push it over the edge - seen it happen many times at our customers. Doing full file scans may cause a drive to fail sooner, but you can be fairly confident that the whole array won't fail when trying to rebuild itself.

Nacelle wrote: I'm not sure. I would first test that out by moving the drives to another system and seeing if you can read from them there.

I've had my boot drive fail on my RAID-5 system before. As long as you have a copy of "/etc/mdadm.conf", which stores the device ID's, you're fine. I have a copy of that file on two other computers on my network, my flash drive, and Dropbox... just in case... Not sure how Windows software RAID stacks up as far as being easy to recover.

I'm thinking of just buying the new SATA 6g version of the drive. Anyone want to buy the replacement drive that I get back from them?

The Newegg price on them are $119. I figured maybe $100. Link