Hacker News Reader

> An SSD that fails is likely to go into a read-only mode that still allows you to recover your data.

My anecdotal experience of 2 ssd drive failure was they were unreadable. If I remember correctly in both case the drive wasn't even listed by the operating system tools as if they were unplugged (can't remember about the bios/UEFI firmware).

Bottom line: do backups and test them regularly.

View on HN

This lines up with mine as well. My HDDs fail more often than SSDs, but when they do it’s a painful slow death that shows itself in SMART and affords me days if not weeks. Out of 5 SSDs I had only one fail, and that one worked perfectly well a moment, next second my OS froze and it wouldn’t show up in BIOS anymore.

Yep, all my SSDs that have failed so far have gone completely undetectable to all the computers I tried to use them on. I have never seen this read-only failure mode personally yet. It feels made-up to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com