SSD Failure & Warranty

I generally try to scan the receipt (or save it as a pdf file) into a folder called 'Receipts'.

SanDisk were acquired by WesternDig in 2016 ... but are due to be spun-off soon.

Not generally, if it was bought for business I could probably dig out the invoice for it ... but for a 4 year old SSD would I bother?

I simply save all the related E-Mail. It's filtered into folders when it arrives so there's just a big folder of (for example) Amazon E-Mail where all the details can be found. I also have a fairly efficient tool for searching E-Mail so I can simply search for '2Tb disk' or some such.

When it comes to device failure that is holding data, I actually take the loss on the chin and physically destroy the device.

Particularly if it has personal photos, personal videos, bank statements, medical info, phone numbers, addresses etc.

Often, with a faulty device you can't perform secure erase processes on it.

What often happens is that when you send the faulty device back, you don't always get the same physical device back repaired, but you get a refurbished device which is someone else's faulty device that they sent in for repair.

So Do you trust the manufacturer to erase the ezisting data to Def Stan after they have repaired it?

You could pick up Malware from a refurb device or someone else could be reading your data.....

Obviously if you have encrypted your data at rest on the drive before it failed, then the above considerations don't apply.

If that encryption requires access to a TPM, If the TPM fails, you are at risk of losing access to your encrypted data even though the data storage device is still functioning......

Stephen.

Any Amazon purchase will still be in your ‘Orders’, which you can filter by year. That entry would be enough to establish your legal credentials of a purchase.

My ‘Orders’ tells me my first ever Amazon purchase was a Sony ICF-M33RDS radio in 2004…

I have started recording date of purchase and serial number.

I used to have trouble linking a particular purchase to a particular disk (I probably buy several per year). So I now record purchase date, installation date and serial number (as well as model, etc.)

I do wonder if I should, like you I have bought several and tying an invoice to a disc is quite difficult.

Many thanks for all the replies :-)

Yes, true, Amazon's search for previous orders is actually quite effective.

Ouch! Did SMART say anything?

Well that's not so bad

I buy online so I can usually look up the transaction

That's a very good question! I used CrystalDiskInfo to look at the SMART data and it returned a heap of stuff for all the drives except for this disk where it just returned a heap of zeros.

o do I but after a few years linking a purchase record with a physical drive gets interesting!

Then you are in a strange place. At least some parameters should be non zero. This doesn't look like 'age related' failure - more like part of the internal electronics has gone bad

The device has "SN".

The retail box has "SKU and SN".

The clerk, when you pay cash at the store for it, scans both the SKU and the SN, when generating the receipt. The receipt does not have the SN printed on it, but some other identifier with a lot of digits is there instead.

Just slip the receipt inside the box, and you can match the device "SN" to the sticker "SN" on the box.

Paul

I just checked mine. It was a couple of boxed sets of a TV programme (on VHS cassette) - October 2001.

The order is marked "Delayed, not yet shipped"

Some products have a Software Toolbox to work with the product, this manufacturer offers a "Dashboard".

Even at the best of times, a Dashboard may not respond to all devices in the manufacturer line.

An opportunity to update firmware is not always good news, as half the firmware updates are "data antagonistic" and cause the data to be erased. (The normal procedure would tell you to do a backup of the device first.)

For the Samsung devices that went into a reallocation spiral (used up all their spares), I don't think the device could be "un-spared" and returned to stock condition by anything the user can do. While an exhortation to update a firmware might seem an option, for an erroneous condition, you want the firmware installed before damage is done. As later, it appears to be too late.

Also, if/when a firmware is offered, you want to Google it and find the back-story for the production of another firmware. To better understand what you're getting for the effort.

Paul

I stick a label on all new disks including the purchase date. I have bought several Crucial SSDs over the last couple of years and I do register them. Not had any failures yet, but if they died, I would probably just destroy (after opening to look inside out of curiosity).

Same here. Particularly sensitive data is encrypted.

I had a Macbook Pro M1 die under warranty. That doesn't have a removable SSD (it's part of the motherboard). Apple ended up changing everything in the laptop except the case bottom to get it working again. Fortunately, the sensitive data was encrypted.

When I worked in a bank looking after systems with 20,000+ disks (where you expect regular drive failures), we paid extra for our maintenance contracts so that whole drives never left site, so the vendor couldn't return them to the manufacturer for a credit. Drives only left site after they'd gone through a drive shredder, which resulted in no pieces larger than 1cm in any dimension in the output hopper.

Yes. Unnecessary in the case of hard drives where every byte can be overwritten, but mandatory for SSDs where data may be hidden in inaccessible blocks, especially if the drive has stopped working...

Faulty hard drives can not usually be overwritten, but data could be extracted in a lab, and some bank data would be well worth doing that for a bad actor.

Even working hard drives have the problem of remapped blocks. When people are not quite so anal about their data and the drive is still working, you can overwrite many times, and then clear the grown defect list (so the drive now goes back to using the original blocks rather than remapped ones), and repeat the clearing process again to catch all those too. That sometimes fails because the original blocks were too faulty to overwrite. It also means that if you are going to reuse the drive, it's lost its record of grown defects and they may well get discovered again later by means of some later data loss.

I would suspect the command to fetch the data failed and that wasn't detected/reported.

For Enterprise disks and SSDs, we routinely applied all new firmware (after testing it on development and QA systems first, of course). We never had any cases where new firmware impacted the data on the disks or SSDs - that would have been a major headache, and one for which we'd need to develop a new procedure.