I tried to boot off of a (reliable for years) OWC SSD today and it's not even showing up in drive utility or disk warrior. Any suggestions on what to do to revive the drive?

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Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger...

Road,

Drop it into an enclosure and see if that makes a difference.

Robert

When SSDs die, they can do so without warning. I've had two go bad so far.

Not sure there's much to be done, other than try it in another enclosure/computer.

Hi-
Both suggestions are spot on. If not showing up in the enclosure, contact our tech support department to help you further.

[eshop.macsales.com]

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Good Luck!
Jamie Dresser
Other World Computing

Thank you for the suggestions. I'll try placing it in an external case later tonight. Will post results.

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Gareth
When SSDs die, they can do so without warning. I've had two go bad so far.

I've been researching recently in preparation for my first SSD purchase and one of the conclusions I've reached is that when SSDs fail, they tend to do so with little to no warning and that backups are even more critical for SSDs than they are for magnetic HDs.

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It is what it is.

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N-OS X-tasy!

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Gareth
When SSDs die, they can do so without warning. I've had two go bad so far.

I've been researching recently in preparation for my first SSD purchase and one of the conclusions I've reached is that when SSDs fail, they tend to do so with little to no warning and that backups are even more critical for SSDs than they are for magnetic HDs.

This mirrors my experience, we had a 120GB OWC MEPro 3G SSD fail after ~2 years of use with no warning, luckily we are backup-paranoid. The warranty replacement Electra 3G has been chugging away for at least 2 years since then in a series of daily-used laptops with no issues.

Getting that early SSD was great as Mrs. Zealand's old Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz MBPro smoked all the other brand new quad core i7 MBPros in everyday tasks as those were all saddled with spinny HDs. The 6GB RAM upgrade helped as well but it ultimately died the GPU death of many of those Santa Rosa units. Still, the RAM and SSD live on in my oldie-but-goodie 2.4 Santa Rosa MB.

N-OS,

All too correct. This is why it's a good idea to backup regularly and I'd also suggest running SMART Utility regularly. The backups will ensure you lose a minimal amount of data due to a drive failure and SMART Utility will hopefully give you a heads up on the status of the drive and give you a bit of warning of a pending failure.

Robert

I got it to mount in an external case, thank you for the tip! I'm doing a carbon copy cloner disk image to be copied to the new drive. My most recent backup was a month old . Any good deals at OWC on a replacement SSD?

If it works in the external case, then the drive itself might be just fine. Where was it installed before?

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C(-)ris
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Throwback Thursday Signature:

It was in an early 2011 17" MBP. It won't stay mounted for long. It took several tries to get it to clone with CCC.

Road,

C(-)ris is right. The hardware of the drive may be fine. I'd do a bit of software troubleshooting before replacing it, i.e. run SMART Utility, wipe it, restore the OS, etc. I've had drives I thought were failing and it turned out to be software issues. Fixed those and all was well once more.

Robert

The problem could be the cable in the MBP.

any chance it's a 13inch MBP?

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A number of MBPs from that era (though it's more common in 2008-2010 models) have a SATA cable which is not "good" enough to handle the full speed SATA throughput of an SSD but are OK for HDD use. This seems strange but our hardware guy here has done dozens of replacements to fix this problem.

The difference here is that we noticed this problem when swapping out an HD for an SSD and that's when the problems start. Pop in a replacement cable (~$20) and all is well. Since your SSD was working well in the machine beforehand, perhaps this is not the case. It's also hard to test this without other known good cables lying around (I have a 15" MPB5,3 cable on my desk here awaiting another flaky SSD upgrade).

yep, had mine replaced 3 times in an old C2D 13" MBP.

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ka jowct
The problem could be the cable in the MBP.

Didn't take long for the OWC SSD's to sell out.

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It is what it is.

I've been meaning to post that I recently had a failed Mercury SSD that got sick - you could use it for about 5 min, then it locked up. We managed to get all of the data off of it, but it failed in the Mac and an external case.

Died age 37 months with 3 year warranty...

All is well. I picked up a PNY 240Gb SSD for $85 + tax at Best Buy, dropped it in the MBP and it's working fine. The Electra drive was in the MBP when I bought it on Ebay @ January 2013. I don't know how old the Electra is for certain, but it lasted at least 2.5 years. Thanks for all of your help!

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Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger...

And thanks for the follow-up!

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.