So my old 80GB spinner was getting long in the tooth, plus it seemed to be burdened tremendously with pagefile operations. Rather than wait for it to die completely, I decided to retire it and upgrade to an SSD, and ultimately did that as a clean install - to a SanDisk Ultra 120GB SSD. That system reinstallation was an epic, partly because I seldom do this, and partly because, well, it probably always is. More and more, I am coming around to the realization that there's more to life than days spent in the reinstallation of software after catastrophic drive failure.
But fast-forward by a scant 75 days: that SSD starts coughing up blood. For a short time, it will show its file-structure, but not let any files be copied. Soon thereafter it won't show up anywhere except in BIOS - not in Disk Management, and certainly not in My Computer. I can't recover anything, apparently - please correct me if anyone knows another trick.
SO...warranty RMA, right? SanDisk's Indian call center agents are busily calling me to follow up on this at 5AM in recent days, asking me (three times now) for my home address, while I am asking myself, "Dave, do you REALLY plan on trusting this RMA'd replacement SSD?" Even if SanDisk had a slick customer-service routine, I'd be asking myself that at this point. (They DON'T.)
My experience with backup doesn't include anything other than non-system drives, and even there, it's sketchy and irregular, though that has to change very soon. What, then, on re-creating this recently-departed C-drive, can be done to maintain a backup system-drive that could, in my fantasy, be swapped out for the NEXT failed C-drive with minimal pain and loss of life? Could a second SSD or spinner be automatically/frequently cloned from the first, say?
But fast-forward by a scant 75 days: that SSD starts coughing up blood. For a short time, it will show its file-structure, but not let any files be copied. Soon thereafter it won't show up anywhere except in BIOS - not in Disk Management, and certainly not in My Computer. I can't recover anything, apparently - please correct me if anyone knows another trick.
SO...warranty RMA, right? SanDisk's Indian call center agents are busily calling me to follow up on this at 5AM in recent days, asking me (three times now) for my home address, while I am asking myself, "Dave, do you REALLY plan on trusting this RMA'd replacement SSD?" Even if SanDisk had a slick customer-service routine, I'd be asking myself that at this point. (They DON'T.)
My experience with backup doesn't include anything other than non-system drives, and even there, it's sketchy and irregular, though that has to change very soon. What, then, on re-creating this recently-departed C-drive, can be done to maintain a backup system-drive that could, in my fantasy, be swapped out for the NEXT failed C-drive with minimal pain and loss of life? Could a second SSD or spinner be automatically/frequently cloned from the first, say?