Computer question: fragmentation

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Did the same thing last week. changed the very elderly 128 Crucial drive (Windows 7 system disk) for a 1TB Samsung SSD. dropped the 128 in a Zalman enclosure that's been sat empty on the shelf for 5 or 6 years and the first job was the good lady asked where all the pictures were from her old phone.

Fortunately un-beknown to her I'd been backing up both her drop-box and phone pictures at home and work for the last 6 years and was able to amalgamate all 25GB worth onto my "new" 128GB USB drive and stick them all on her office computer for sorting out.

It's bloody brilliant, wish I'd done it sooner. :)

[Martin Brown]

I think he is being unduly pessimistic. The odd early SDD had controller faults that could lose all data. I have had one brick on me.

The one thing that does tend to happen differently with SSDs is that with spinning rust you generally get plenty of warning of impending doom with weird noises, slow downs, CRC errors and SMART diagnostics.

IME an SSD fails catastrophically with total loss of all data and without any warning. Once bricked all content is long gone unless you use very specialised recovery services. Spinning rust you have a fair chance of getting most of the data back safely yourself (very slowly).

[Scott]

I thought the write function failed first and the read data remained available to access. Is this totally wrong?

[Martin Brown]

In an ideal world it might be true, but the only example of SSD failure I have had the thing died so completely that no utilities could even recognise it as a hard drive after it declined to boot up the machine.