Solid State Drive Failure

Having a hard drive fail is never a great situation.

I have been pretty fortunate only 4 drives have failed in 20 years.  Probably about 100 drives in total which is a 4% failure rate which is about double the norm. It is infrequent, but traumatic. I can remember every one.  The most recent was the newest hard drive I purchased a Kingston SSDnow 64 GB solid state drive. this drive lasted 4 months. Before the failure, I was very happy with the drive. Quiet and fast. I could cold boot in less than 20 seconds. Then nothing. Drive not found said the BIOS. Tried the drive on another PC. Drive not found said that BIOS. Wonderful.

The best thing about this drive failure was really understanding that my data was not impacted. Dropbox, external drives and a FTP server had everything that was mission critical. I was able to swap the original drive into my Dell Vostro V13 and was back to work. Kingston was very responsive once I navigated their site. Drive replaced upon receipt of the original drive. Total turnaround was 5 days. A half-day to reinstall the drive with OS and programs and I am back. Not thrilled that I lost the original drive, but it could have been much worse. Kingston was great. They should make it a lot easier to find how to get help. The current site is difficult to navigate when your blood pressure is up.

The lesson: PCs are now merely the tool to access data, not the repository of data. Email, files, etc. all live off-device. More and more capability is pushed off the PC until we have a true “network computer.” The biggest issue I now face will be replacing the iTunes Library. Moreover, this will make me think about how we interact with computers and how that will change in the future.