LEE GRANT A batch of faulty SSDs emphasises why it’s time to BACK UP YOUR DATA! Plus, Lee makes a prediction that AMD, Intel and Microsoft won’t like…
A batch of faulty SSDs emphasises why it’s time to BACK UP YOUR DATA! Plus, Lee makes a prediction that AMD, Intel and Microsoft won’t like…
It began with a phone call. The gasping voice on the other end was attempting to reinforce how disastrous the issue was for her business and that her broken laptop required immediate attention. I tapped at our shop system until Jasmin’s records appeared and then emitted a small groan. The last time I’d had my hands on the laptop was at the end of January 2020, when I’d released it from the unsafe shackles of Windows 7 and bestowed it with the greatness of Windows 10.
The machine belonged to the Intel i3 generation, so we’d added an SSD for a bit of pep. Regular readers may recall that the demise of Windows 7 was a busy time in the PC retail and repair sector; we put together a nice little package for customers that included an SSD upgrade, drive clone and upgrade to Windows 10. It seems everyone had the same idea because SSDs were tougher to source than a snog at a 2020 Christmas party. We’d receive whispered phone calls from the wholesalers promising they’d nip down to the warehouse and bag 20 drives before they hit the website. It was rather exciting really.
We’d fitted Jasmine’s machine with an Adata SU650 480GB, a SATA SSD in a 2.5in package. It’s a timeproven and cost-effective drive that’s cheaper than, say, the equivalent Samsung 860 Pro. For example, Jasmine’s SU650 has a three-year warranty and a terabytes written (TBW) rating of 280. TBW is defined as the amount of data written to the entire drive in its lifespan. The calculation for the SU650 is 280TBW divided by 1,095 days (that is, three years), which as you all know is 0.255TB/day – or 255GB of writes per day for three years. A Samsung 860 Pro has a 600TBW rating and a five-year warranty, which equates to 328GB of writes per day for five years. If you’re after an SSD, speed isn’t the only metric to think about.
The SU650 inside Jasmine’s machine is perfectly adequate for her workload, but as this is Real World Computing we can safely throw TBWs and warranties into the bin because, mere months after installation, the drive was stuffed. Jasmine’s laptop wouldn’t start so I removed the drive into our data-retrieval machine and, before I’d fired up any tools, Windows popped up a toast message declaring that there may be a problem with the drive. I run HDSentinel ( hdsentinel. com) on all of my machines to monitor SSD health and produce alerts the moment it gets any whiff of issues.
The drive appeared in angry red with a health reading of 9% accompanied by warnings of bad sectors, which usually means that data recovery is going to be extremely problematic. From a customer-service perspective, this is the moment where delicacy and diplomacy are required to diffuse the reality and resentment.
Jasmine’s last full backup had occurred some time during the Middle Ages and pointing out that warranties only cover hardware wasn’t going to quell her anger. As she still possessed the SATA drive that we removed in
January, I repeated the clone and upgrade to give her a working machine. Luckily, the most critical files that Jasmine had feared lost turned up as attachments amongst her sent items, so together we dodged a few bullets and quickly go t the machine back to where she was happy and relieved. Only at this point could I enquire about backups and suggest ways to protect data from the inevitable hardware failures that await us all. Jasmine went home with a smile on her face (which is always the aim of the game), but I’m deeply unhappy about the entire episode as this isn’t the first SSD failure of the week. It’s the eighth.
All the cases are identical to Jasmine’s and every drive is the Adata SU650 SSD purchased in January from two different suppliers. Throw this lot into the pile with other recent SSD failures and we’re well over a dozen; whilst this is a single-digit percentage of total drives fitted around this time, it provides a cause for concern. Trying to pacify disgruntled customers by blaming the SSDs is like Gordon Ramsay blaming his sunken soufflés on a chicken for laying poor-quality eggs. As far as all these clients are concerned, our service has failed and we will rectify the situation free of charge – that’s customer service.
From our side of the till, we’ve been let down by drives failing very early into their lifespan and it’s hours of unpaid work, returns costs, hassle and a stack of inconvenienced customers. One supplier admitted that it had seen a slightly higher rate of SSD returns and hinted that it may have received a “bad batch”.
Remember, any storage can fail and data recovery can be very expensive, so make sure your backup routine is sound. PC Pro included a backup software Labs a few months
“Jasmine’s last full backup had occurred some time during the Middle Ages”
ago ( see issue 315, p74) and if you’re after a bit of software to help, visit the
PC Pro store ( store.pcpro.co.uk) for some great offers. Most SSD manufacturers provide monitoring software so get it installed or grab a copy of HDSentinel. An SSD is like a rabbit stopping for a wee in the outside lane of the M62 – its health can diminish in the blink of an eye, so any form of advanced warning is useful.
Farewell Wintel?
As a micro-business, we don’t have resources for a dedicated business development team, so one of the ways we keep up to speed with the tech world is by reading the fine magazine you’re currently clutching and listening to the PC Pro podcast, where you’ll often hear Messrs Collins and Honeyball chuntering about the future of Microsoft Windows. I think they’re onto something.
For instance, have you used Windows 10 on a small, cheap SSD recently? Please don’t as it’s a painful experience that becomes even more excruciating on older technology. This isn’t an earth-shattering revelation but consider the current mainstream Windows’ laptop market is full of budget machines with low-powered CPUs, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. A 2021 laptop should easily outperform its 2018 equivalent, but the difference is barely noticeable as Windows 10 continues to waddle through its update cycle.
The next significant milestone for Windows is January 2023 when Windows 8 reaches “End of Life”. I’m often contacted by Windows 8 users asking about upgrades to Windows 10 and the advice I give is to stay put. Windows 8 machines will be much older and even if we spend cash to throw DDR3 and an SSD at them, a Windows 10 upgrade may give the net result of a machine that’s more or less the same speed as the one the customer currently owns.
SSDs have been making Windows 10 look good for years and, despite countless updates, Microsoft seems allergic to anything that would optimise performance. I think Redmond has decided that speed and responsiveness are a hardware consideration, which is a problem for someone else to resolve.
And on that note, brace yourselves: I’m about to engage my inner Mystic Meg and I’ve seen a vision in the tea leaves.
AMD won big at the 2020 PC Pro Excellence awards ( pcproawards. co.uk) and the fantastically produced (and presented) video you’ll find at the site explains why I’m a fan of Team Red. It’s been fascinating to watch AMD finally break the Intel stranglehold with the thirdgen Ryzen and then repeat the success with the fourth and the fifth. The two most popular consoles on the planet at the moment are both powered by AMD hardware, whilst Intel has hit the headlines for being ditched by its long-term partner and is busy shuffling its management in the hope it can catch up.
Intel launched the “Tiger Lake” versions of its 11th-generation chips last October and no one cared. I’m a system builder and Intel’s 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” desktop chip is due any moment and I couldn’t be less excited. My eye is elsewhere.
Apple’s M series has ridden into town and from the moment I heard Jon Honeyball give his learned opinion on episode 517 of the PC Pro podcast ( pcpro.link/318pod), I could smell change in the air. As has been very well documented, the M series is Apple’s own chip based upon ARM tech and this alone says much when you consider Microsoft’s diabolical failure with the same product. The M package throws together RAM, GPU and a CPU into one block and whilst this chimes several bells with my “right to repair” sensibilities, I cannot argue that Apple has blended one hell of a product.
The M1 had to be brilliant as it required a divorce from Intel to bring it to market. It wouldn’t surprise me if digital historians cite this event as the beginning of the end for Team Blue.
If that doesn’t sound crazy enough, then I also have predictions about the M series’ effect on Microsoft.
Windows is part of our digital heritage and it seems inconceivable to imagine a world without it. People used to say the same about Nokia, Kodak, Myspace, Black Berry and AOL, but in the modern capitalist culture ingrained into most of the world, it doesn’t take much to destabilise the status quo. If Apple really wants to dominate (and it does), then all it needs to defenestrate us is a £400 “MacBook SE” and the M series makes this unbelievably simple to achieve. Consider the current price/ performance of a Windows laptop and suddenly Apple’s extortionate pricing doesn’t seem far-fetched.
Au revoir, Microsoft.
A new rivalry
So, with Intel nailed, that leaves
Team Red. I’ve built with AMD hardware for years and whilst the latest Ryzen kit is top-drawer, most of its predecessors were pretty awful. AMD’s survival is down to its acquisition in 2006 of ATI as the graphical power of their chips have kept the business afloat. Jonathan Bray’s pre-Ryzen reviews always boiled down to “the CPU is rubbish but the graphics are great” so Apple’s M series will need to change strategy if it’s to eradicate AMD too.
If only there was a global corporate behemoth that excelled in graphical processing power and had the resources to build and develop on the ARM platform at its fingertips…
We can all look forward to PC Pro issue 500, featuring Jonathan Bray’s “Who is the greatest: Apple or Nvidia?” CPU shootout.
“If Apple wants to dominate then all it needs to defenestrate us is a £400 ‘MacBook SE’”