First ever SSD Failure
 

My Dell E7250 has a 512GB M.SATA SSD. On Friday I was using the machine when it suddenly and totally locked up with no error message. I power cycled and the BIOS says no HDD installed. Put the SSD in another machine, same result. Put he SSD in a USB carrier, again, not showing up at all. That's it, total failure with no warning at all. New SSD is now installed and I had CrashPlan Pro so I didn't loose any data, but boy, getting everything reinstalled has taken 2 days. The worst part is re-joining the corporate domain remotely, that's something what very few of our IT support people can do successfully. MSDirect Access still requires various hoops to be jumped through, even in Windows 10.

Just needed to rant. I probably have 10 machines with SSD's and I've never had one fail before. I somewhat suspect that heat may have something to do with the failure, the Dell Latitude E7250 seems to run hot, especially when docked.

How old is the SSD and was it heavily written to? Did it have large files occupying a majority of its capacity which were written once and then never changed?

Having a large area that's written once and not changed matters for flash drives but it doesn't matter for SSDs. As the life wears down on other cells they'll take that stationary data and move it.

Furthermore, a SSD that end-of-life locks should become read only, not simply vanish.

6 months old. Hynix 512GB. It was the total binary nature of the failure in the space of 2 seconds that floored me....

Actually, SSDs that exceed their endurance limits tend to stop responding after a reboot. They do go read-only for hopefully long enough to copy over anything critical, but as OP found out, that's not guaranteed.

I'm aware of some going dead after an end-of-life lock + reboot. That's a bad design as far as I'm concerned. They should simply be permanently read-only.

This is the first SSD failure I've ever heard of.

I have an E7250 as well with the 256GB Hynix SSD - no issues so far and it's been about 1.5 years since I have had it.

Hope it was a random failure. Dell sent me another Hynix. It took me 2 days to get everything back up to the way it was....

A friend of mine had a defective SSD in her MacBook Air (Apple actually recalled some of them: https://www.apple.com/support/macbookair-flashdrive/). The Apple Retailer efffed up and the SSD failed again only weeks later. Two SSD fails within a brief time period.

But I've seen more HDD fails over the years. Dropping laptops or generally mistreating your notebook doesn't get you far. Strangely nobody ever takes the bizarre noice their HDD makes seriously... :rolleyes:

At my old company we had a whole bunch of Dells with Samsung PM800 drives that failed in pretty big numbers. BSOD and poof. I think some original MacBook Airs suffered a similar fate.

That would (typically) show up with very different symptoms and for a machine as recent as the E7250 would require some incredibly abusive workloads. A "poof" like that is vastly more likely to be a board-level or controller failure (or very occasionally a full-die flash failure), which in regular laptop use is almost always just bad luck involving a manufacturing flaw or major electrical fault (although abusive thermal conditions can cause it as well.)

Over 7 years of using thousands of them between data center and laptops/desktops at my old company, we had probably somewhere around a dozen drives fail. Substantially more reliable than hard drives.

None of them were nearing the end of their useful life in terms of write endurance as best I can tell (on the servers we monitored that on literally every machine, on desktops only by sampling.) Most of them were relatively new drives, although I think we had a couple of the 2nd-gen Intel X25Ms die at ~4-5 years inside servers for no explained reason, with anywhere from 25-50% of their usable like left.

It might be because it was a low-budget SSD (OCZ Agility 3 120GB 2.5IN SATA3 Sandforce SF-2281) but I had a near-new fail on me 4 years ago. Got it late August and used it for over a month to make sure it didn't fail (purpose was to provide a week of in-vehicle usage for the type/style of road navigation in Europe a cell phone or GPS still can't provide).

Got to Vienna in the 2nd week of October and the unit failed the day after we arrived. Same symptom as noticed by the OP - no boot device recoqnised by BIOS. Good thing I had the OEM HD with me as a backup.

RMA'd the unit when we got home and the replacement was DOA. 3rd unit was still working the last time I checked (and used for ~6 months of in-vehicle navigation with several hibernationsa day).

Not surprising:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

These anecdotal stories make me very nervous about swapping out my HDD for an SSD on my laptop, so I did a little bit of a web search on SDD failure rates.

ZDnet reports on a Google study that might be helpful: http://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-rel...es-experience/

I wouldn't stay away from using a SSD just because of reported failures. However, it is always good to back up (or at least use some cloud service) and carry the OEM drive and the tool(s) to install it if you need to have your computer working. Not much more space or weight than an iPod.