SSD is gone!

Hi Guys,

So I recently bought a new Intel X-25M 80GB SSD here on this forum. Matt, great seller by the way, shipped it right away and soon I was enjoying my blazing fast MBP 15 i7 with a nice combination of SSD in OPTI-BAY and 500GB where it should be. I configured OSx to be on SSD only, and divided 500gb between data disc and a 150GB Win7 partition.

Last night I was working and shut it down for the night. Today when I brought it to school it failed to start. When holding alt the only option I have is to boot into win7 partition ( which works fine). SSD is gone, even from Disk Management in Control Panel and Device Manager.

What happened? Any idea on how to diagnose? I'm sure the SSD is still under warranty, but it's scary for it to die after a month of use. I'd really appreciate your feedback as I have a very important paper on the SSD and my last backup is few days ago...

Any software that could help?

Thanks,

Arv

 

I hate to say this but if the work is so critical you really need daily backups. As for the SSD itself, is there any way that you could move it into the Mac and ditch the optical drive bay thing? You need to confirm it is the drive that is bad.

That being said if the drive is toast, there is little you can do other than get it replaced with Intel.

 

Hey Greg,

Yeah, usually time machine backs up automatically, so maybe the backup is there. I might lose few hours of work though...

My plan is to open the computer as soon as I get home. It suck because I have 3 classes today and only < 3 hours battery life ;P heheh small things make you appreciate Os X

Does it often happen with SSDs? Are they really that unreliable?

 

I'm going to take just a quick second to make sure I'm clear on something - battery life sucks in Windows because Apple's drivers are not up to snuff. It isn't Microsoft's problem .

How often does this stuff happen with SSDs? A lot more often than you'd think, though Intel does seem to have a good track record with reliability so far. I honestly expected that you had an OCZ SSD prior to my opening this thread up; over the last few months their reliability and quality has really fallen.

Anyway, the answer is that SSD is still unproven technology but the emerging trend that I see is that hard drives are still superior in that regard. SSDs are only guaranteed to win on throughput.

 

And the SSD is back

Fortunately, the SATA cable got unplugged. It did scare me though.

 

Completely untrue. Windows uses more resources than Mac OS X. Most PC's have poor to moderate battery life and any of the newer PC notebooks with decent battery life come at the expense of using a larger battery for the most part.

 

How big is the battery on a 13" MBP? Most notebooks have poor battery life because they cheap out on the battery and/or power saving features.

Genuinely curious on this one.

 

I'm not sure about the cell count but the 13" MBP has a 63.5Whr lithium polymer battery which rates at 10 hrs on a Core 2 duo processor. The 15" uses a 77.5Whr and the 17" has a 95Whr battery for 8-9 hours on Core i5 and i7. Most PC's I've seen with a 9Cell 85Whr battery generally are much heavier due to the bigger battery and the battery adds bulk. The Macbook's battery doesn't add any bulk and the enclosure is generally much thinner than most PC's.
I have heard that Toshiba is releasing a new thin notebook with 10-11 hours battery but there's been no testing on it as of yet.

 

Cell count isn't a concern, capacity is. My E4300 has a 60WHr battery and gets between 6-6.5 hours of battery life with W7 (actual, not what Dell claims which is higher). From my experiences MBPs tend to last about 7-8 hours (inline with my Dell if not just a hair better).

Now I'm the one that's taken something off-topic .

Good to hear the drive is still working.

 

The MBP's battery size to computer size ratio is quite large. See this link for a technical explanation:

Apple - MacBook Pro - Learn all about the breakthrough battery

 

I just replaced my factory 5400rpm harddrive in my MBP with the OCZ Vertex 2 240GB SSD. So far so good. Boot times are under 14 secs. I read some really good things for the Vertex 2 line. Is there a line/model that have had problems?

 

I am not sure about the Vertex 2 drives but any of the more recent Vertex or Agility drives seem to suffer very specific issues. If you visit their forum you'll see a majority of the complaints come from drives disappearing occasionally (I had a few 60GB SSDs that suffered this issue), premature death (I had one 60GB drive do this too), file corruption (never had that issue but again a lot of complaints about it), and firmware upgrades that always seem to be problematic.

I've heard some ramblings of those issues continuing with the Vertex 2 drives but again I am unsure about this. If it is true that suggests OCZ has some quality control issues (which given my experience they do).

 

I haven't really been posting of late, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to uh, politely disagree with you?


The reason battery life sucks on all Macs running operating systems other than primary OSX --yes, this includes every distro of Linux, and BSD, as well as Windows-- is due to a hardware management issue. OSX uses SMC to regulate fan speed, and more importantly, chip voltages. The Apple provided drivers do not take advantage of SMC to regulate CPU input voltage, thus, it's constantly burning in the chip. Updating drivers won't really help in that regard, since nobody else's drivers take into account SMC. Nobody else really uses EFI either. There was actually a big issue I think back in 2008 on the MBPs where SMC wasn't working properly and fried a number of notebooks.

You can't reason it down to more threads and processes. Seriously. I get around 2-3 hours of battery life running my 60MB Linux install, and roughly the same in Windows. I get over 6 hours in OSX, and I have a Macbook 4,1 (White, Early 2008 Model). I'm not very good at explaining things I guess. Google it if you wish.



On a more related note... the Vertex and Agility series have had their issues. Most of them have been fixed in the Vertex/Agility 2 series. OCZ does have some QC issues (mostly with their RAM). I haven't seen any bad OCZ V2/A2 drives yet. I had read about issues with the older SandForce firmware. I'm pretty sure SF1200 is stable for use.

If you've got an X25-M, then check out Intel's SSD Toolbox.