Heat Can Heal Dead NAND Flash Cells and Extend Life

[Guest]

Few users may have ever reached the end of life of a flash drive, yet we know that mainstream drives can, realistically, not exceed 100,000 read/write cycles and many cheap flash drives are even rated well below that.

Heat Can Heal Dead NAND Flash Cells and Extend Life : Read more

 

[warezme]

Is this like all those Nvidia owners with laptops that had the faulty video chips and if they put the mobo in the oven at a certain temperature it would remelt the solder and the chip would start to work again. I had a friend who did it and it worked for a few months and then it quit again and he put it back in the oven a second time and got it work one more time but then the mobo had started to warp and quit after a few more months.

 

[friskiest]

And I thought heat is not good for electronics! If heating really does deal flash memory, then that would be great.

 

[memadmax]

NICE.
Thats something you would prolly never think of because you think of heat as the number one enemy to silicon.

 

[djscribbles]

[citation][nom]warezme[/nom]Is this like all those Nvidia owners with laptops that had the faulty video chips and if they put the mobo in the oven at a certain temperature it would remelt the solder and the chip would start to work again. I had a friend who did it and it worked for a few months and then it quit again and he put it back in the oven a second time and got it work one more time but then the mobo had started to warp and quit after a few more months.[/citation]

No, it's nothing like that.

 

[bucknutty]

hmm... to bad the oven in my home only goes up to 450.

 

[milktea]

800 degrees Celsius is not something I want in my computer or anywhere in my house that I might accidently touch!

 

[Guest]

Do not use microwave oven!

 

[bison88]

Finally, something other than super read/write speeds are being addressed in the NAND/SSD sector. The biggest problem has always been reliability and those write cycles have steadily been dropping from SLC > MLC > TLC. Even though controllers have become more advanced it isn't comforting knowing such extremely low limits compared to HDD's, this should help if it ever comes to fruition. Only problem is how the hell you're going to heat it to 800 degrees as this is currently being done cell by cell. There are billions of flash cells.

 

[amk-aka-Phantom]

[citation][nom]bucknutty[/nom]hmm... to bad the oven in my home only goes up to 450.[/citation]

From Wikipedia: "...with a typical melting range of 90 to 450 °C (190 to 840 °F). It is commonly used in electronics and plumbing, and when manually applied is often done so using a soldering iron or soldering gun. Alloys that melt between 180 and 190 °C (360 and 370 °F) are the most commonly used."

So your oven should be good, though I've heard that you shouldn't heat the card about a certain temperature like 90 °C anyway unless you want to damage the parts that were not rated for higher temps. I probably should do it myself, got an old 8800GT that looks like re-soldering could help it.

 

[freggo]

Good to know. Next time the wife bakes cookies I'll slip some old SSD in with 'em.
Fresh cookies AND fresh memory... perfect

 

[fudoka711]

[citation][nom]freggo[/nom]Good to know. Next time the wife bakes cookies I'll slip some old SSD in with 'em.Fresh cookies AND fresh memory... perfect[/citation]

This made me laugh! =D

 

[MKBL]

It sounds like the said heater is engineered to provide isolated heat to the cells in short time, not propagating excessive energy too broadly, which should be key claims in its patent. Oven-baking is a little bit ambitious imagination.

 

[WyomingKnott]

So it's freeze a hard drive and bake an SSD?

 

[mikenygmail]

[citation][nom]WyomingKnott[/nom]So it's freeze a hard drive and bake an SSD?[/citation]

Placing old hard drives on their side, or upside down also works well, along with a nice low level format. If the motor dies, try "spanking" the hard drive (in a safe place) with the power on, it will jump start the motor again and the drive will once again start chugging along. This may sound like a joke but it actually works great! Use extreme caution, of course.

 

[samanosuke47]

That's pretty neat. I'm interested in seeing how they progress with this.. would be neat to have a SSD that could theoretically live forever.

 

[sammual777]

[citation][nom]mikenygmail[/nom]Placing old hard drives on their side, or upside down also works well, along with a nice low level format. If the motor dies, try "spanking" the hard drive (in a safe place) with the power on, it will jump start the motor again and the drive will once again start chugging along. This may sound like a joke but it actually works great! Use extreme caution, of course.[/citation]

And after the spanking, the oral sex.

 

[Mathos]

*Voices of several young women* Ooh a spanking, a spanking!

 

[danwat1234]

SSDs, at least 34nm MLC ones are more durable than you may think. Hundreds of Terabytes is very realistic. My trusty 34nm Intel G2 ought to last about 15 more years.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page216&post#5380


Putting heaters inside of an SSD, you'd think it would have a hard time getting that hot with the power that a laptop SATA port could output, unless it used a capacitor.

 

[CaedenV]

lol, how do you rate the power usage of that drive?
New:2-5W
End of life: 250W

 

[bucknutty]

From Wikipedia: "...with a typical melting range of 90 to 450 °C (190 to 840 °F). It is commonly used in electronics and plumbing, and when manually applied is often done so using a soldering iron or soldering gun. Alloys that melt between 180 and 190 °C (360 and 370 °F) are the most commonly used."

So your oven should be good, though I've heard that you shouldn't heat the card about a certain temperature like 90 °C anyway unless you want to damage the parts that were not rated for higher temps. I probably should do it myself, got an old 8800GT that looks like re-soldering could help it.

I know this is unrelated but:

I have personally baked a 8800gt a 8800gts and a 8800gtx. They all came back to life and worked again. The 8800gt died again about 6 months later, but the 8800gts and the 8800gtx are still going strong now 2 years after thier trip to the oven. I also baked a HD4850. That card had plastic capacitors that all popped and filled my house with a wonderful smelling fog.
My wife was very unhappy.

 

[alidan]

you know, next year we are probably looking at 512 drives in the 50 cents a gb range that will probably only get 250-500 writes.

keep in mind thats about 125tb to 250tb of data

even with FAR lower than hdd write stats, ssds still maintain a probably lower fail rate than hdd just because of the mechanical hardware side alone.

let alone most people will never write that much data in the whole working time of their motherboard in the first place.

 

[JonnyDough]

[citation][nom]vingfel[/nom]Do not use microwave oven![/citation]

I tried it, it worked! You should try it too.

SSD in microwave = awesome.

 

[Evolution2001]

[citation][nom]warezme[/nom]Is this like all those Nvidia owners with laptops that had the faulty video chips and if they put the mobo in the oven at a certain temperature it would remelt the solder and the chip would start to work again. [/citation]As some have already mentioned, it's not the same process.
You are referring to the process called "reballing".
I used the poor man's version of the process to revive my HP Pavilion dv9000-series laptop. (There was a class-action lawsuit against nVidia for failing to properly cool the GPU, leading to premature failure.)
Amusingly- until you understand the science- the fix is to reheat the GPU well beyond it's own thermal ceiling. It essentially melts the solder and allows it to reseat itself in the channels or array.
You can find videos on YouTube showing people fixing their dv9000's or just showing commercial applications of the process. Just search for the word reballing.

You definitely do not want to bake an entire PCB. There are too many other components that aren't intended to take that much heat, such as all the plastic connectors or caps. Even doing the poor man's reball, you still need to mask off everything around the chip so you don't incur collateral damage.

 

[bucknutty]

The fog definitely triggered some "rage like" symptoms in my wife. But that was like 2 years ago, so no harm no foul. Cough Cough.