I remember when SSD drives came out and they were touted as a much more reliable storage medium than traditional disk drives because they didn’t have whirling mechanical parts inside. However my friend has a 5 year old computer with an SSD drive that has recently failed. What causes this if there are no moving parts inside?
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It’s not that SSDs don’t fail, it’s just that they fail in different ways. The fact that SSDs have no moving parts does make them much less susceptible to damage from vibration and being dropped, but that alone doesn’t make them fail-proof. Just using an SSD wears it out, even if no part fails. Each bit of memory on an SSD where a 1 or a 0 is stored has a finite amount of times it can be erased and re-written. So if you had a drive that was constantly being filled up and then written over, its lifespan will be shorter than one being used for long-term storage. Since most people use a drive by storing a fair bit of stuff and using the free space for managing smaller files, this would wear out one section of the drive faster than the rest. To compensate for this, SSDs actually move around where the data is stored on them so that the wear and tear on the parts being reused is spread evenly across all its memory.
That is generally how the memory itself can die, which says nothing of all the other little bits in a drive that can fail. Your typical drive in a PC has a built in controller to manage the memory, inputs and outputs, as well as some hardware to deliver power. If any of these fail the drive can be as good as dead since your PC can no longer talk to it. Your data might still be in there but you’ll likely need a professional to take the thing apart and recover it.
Usually if the whole drive dies suddenly it’s because the controller on the drive has had a failure rather than the memory itself. Could be the onboard cpu has gone bad.
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