SSD BOOT FAILURe

[slipknot.giorgos]

So I have the Western Digital Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB as my hdd in which I have windows 10 installed in and as boot option and I also have the Kingston SSD 240GB in which I have my games stored in.
Today I restarded my pc because steam wouldnt load and after restarting ,booting would take forever. Sometimes it would simply boot endlessly ,other times it would say Scanning E: (my ssd) 0% with no results.I finally got it to boot by unplugging my SSD but every file or programm I had in it was white and inaccessible.

In conclusion, is my SSD simply dead? And if yes , what could possible cause it?

 

[finitekosmos]

How old is your SSD?

SSD's aren't invulnerable devices. They will eventuallly succumb to wear as electrical circuits that are repeatedly written to can burn out or fuse together this is essentially known as Write endurance, its the number of times the NAND circuitry can be written to before it's anticipated to fail.

Many SSD's manage this problem by spreading writes out across the entire drive, so lets say you have a drive that for arguments sake has NAND circuitry that can withstand 1 million writes. But if you only have a 240GB drive the chances of you hitting that on any specific NAND register are higher than they would be if you were using a 1TB drive.

In addition to this, a lot can also come down to the controller chip on the drive too. This is why more expensive SSD's have value to those of us who buy them, they have greater endurance and a better drive controller chip that can potentially spread the wear and more efficiently use the drive. As far as possible causes go it could simply be down to wear and tear, you haven't provided the age of the drive which can also play a role too. Most SSD warranties will say that the drives are warranted for a certain number of writes or a certain number of years whichever comes first.

 

[slipknot.giorgos]

Yeah but how come my pc wouldnt boot ,even though boot process is on the HDD? Also the SSD should be around 4-6 years old but the HDD is even older I think. Do HDDs have longer life time?

 

[finitekosmos]

Its possible that while you selected your HDD as the drive to which you installed Windows, the drive which contained the Windows Boot manager may have been your SSD.

This can happen in some configurations. especially if you are letting the BIOS do all the work of sorting out the drive boot priority order. Windows can be installed to any drive in the computer, but if you selected the HDD while your SSD was the primary boot device, when the SSD failed it could prevent your machine from booting.

An alternative suggestion is that if the drive failed, depending on how it failed, your Computer may simply be caught in a bootstrapping loop with the drive controller chip, where the system is basically continually requesting the startup condition of the drive (if its ready to start) and perhaps the drive never acknowledges it or only partially acknowledges.

HDD's are interesting too, they are also subject to wear and tear and tend to either fail within a few months of them being used, or they last for several years. However they absolutely do wear out eventually. A HDD relies on a motor spinning a collection of magnetic metal platters, a second mechanism positions a magnetic drive head to a location on the disc to read the data contained there. The Bearings inside the motor mechanism will eventually wear out, and/or the drive heads themselves will also fail eventually its just a question of which will go first. Asides from that HDD's are subject to issues when subjected to severe vibration/knocks and strong magnetic sources too.

HDD's were and in some cases are still considered to have a longer serviceable lifespan than SSD's however HDD's are delicate devices with complex moving parts that aren't present in SSD's. I'd say that drives like the Samsung 970 Pro would probably give a few HDD's a run for their money over long term use. Either way both of your drives are now long past their warranted lifespans. I'd strongly advise you look at replacing the HDD if you get a chance too.