SSD C: Drive Kaput - Warning!

This is kind of a warning, kind of just me venting. A month or so ago my computer decided to have a little fit, I got pissed at it, and shut off its power, as it was totally frozen.

I have an Intel SSD system drive.

Or, rather, had.

Good thing I had the old Intel SSD that I had cloned when I needed more space, (80 GB to 160GB)

I don't keep media on my system drive, just system stuff. But it takes a long time to set all that up and get it all working, especially authorizations, downloads, etc.

Anyway, remember that post Marcus was talking about SSD's being susceptible to data loss/corruption upon power loss?

Well I think that's what got me.

Currently cloning the old system disk (Using AOMEI Backupper) to a larger SSD so I can get back to work without the slowdowns due to the 80GB drive being too full.

Recovery programs sometimes see the drive, but it doesn't stay "alive" long enough to recover, and machine crashes/lockups ensue. Formatting it in order to be able to recover the data also doesn't work.

There goes another couple hundred in stock revenue down the drain, not to mention the ongoing headache and lost productivity.

Lessons:

-Buy two identical system drives and mirror image them so you can swap and keep working
-Don't get mad at your machine and yank the plug, especially when you have SSD's in the system
-Have that SSD protector thingie Marcus mentioned.
-Do not succumb to the urge to take the whole mess outside and cut loose with the 12-gauge
-Probably a lot of things I'm not realizing, but it's hard to think when precious time is slipping away.

Dangit.

Open to suggestions, but I need to make and tag video, not fritter away time trying to recover.

Sorry to hear that - nothing worse than the computer time-bandit working overtime.

My Dell has a 'backup and recovery manager' which I don't keep as up to date as I should - I'm hoping that will save me time if the worst happens.

Hang in there.

Every time I rebuild my computer (major upgrades), I create an image of the base Windows install with all updates, AV and critical software for fast restoration.

In fact, I "upgraded" from a 1 TB standard SATA drive to a 240GB SSD for my boot drive on my main computer.

Dave,
What software do you use to create the image?

Acronis - True Image

My systems are never "done" being set up. This last backup was from before a lot of ProTools and virtual instrument installs, among other things - I do dread reinstalling all that, especially as all the downloads were foolishly only on that drive. But at least I now have tons more space with which to work.

Yuppers. Acronis is the best I have found as well. Love that product.

Acronis=pretty cool. Please bear with me while I express my naivete'.

Why would Acronis be better than simply having a mirror image physical drive from cloning which could be cloned at any time and swapped in case of a bad thing happening?

I mean besides having the true offsite backup in the cloud.

Reason: I could buy an identical drive, maybe even another, for close to the same price, clone my existing system drive to it, and send it to my mother in law (for example). The PITA happens of course, when a couple months go by, and I have added a few programs/plugins, or tweaked the system for better performance, and the crash would set me back to before this occurred. But looks like Acronis would be the same. Right? Unless I backed up each week, which I don't want to do.

I seem to agree. All that is really needed is a duplicate or mirror on a separate SSD. Not sure that it had to be an identical drive. My 256 SSD is actually the size of a CF card and is mounted to the motherboard. I really don't feel safe with it so I'm looking at getting a "normal" SSD to clone the operating system and programs onto as a swap backup. Any reason that won't work?

Time moves on and this might become less and less relevant, but if you do a track-by-track copy between two crap SSD drives, the backup SSD drive will think that every sector is actually written to. It's possible that a clever clone program might work around this.

Flash has a rather pitiful max number of writes count and you don't write sector to sector as on a spindle drive. If the drive is full to 90% and you write something, it will do in the free 10%. If you saved an existing document, then some of the used will be freed up. If you write to the same place (say tmp work file for a render job), you'll (more or less) exhaust the free 10% + the area you freed. "TRIM" support is supposed to compensate for this behavior.. Anyway, if you do a full mirror and the mirror is stupid (copy the lot, byte by byte) the spare will likely have a crap durability when you take that into production.

(This is why many recommend to only partition say 80% of an SSD)

In a few years SSD drives will be better, they already are getting there, but I'd be cautious just getting two cheap drives. I'd rather do an Acronis backup to the NAS drive, and when the main SSD borks, I'd just go out and get a new one. Hopefully faster and bigger at the same price.

This is not really a concern with say the recommended Intel S3500 drive.