Win 7 Update Problem?

[Paul]

O.K., this was an interesting exercise:

1. The new SSD was a newer model and thinner than the original. It came
with a a rubber foam "gasket" that was joined to the SSD with adhesive.
My first guess was that this was to get the correct thickness for the
unit. In fact, it went in O.K, but you really couldn't get the 4
retaining screws to penetrate the material to secure the drive to the
chassis. So, with DELL's approval, I removed the gasket and tried to
install the drive. Had to turn over the laptop to let "gravity" align
the connectors ( per DELL advice). It then inserted.

2. Tried the restore from the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment and
found that the new drive was partition slightly different - the C;
partition on the new SSD was about 1GB too small (there was a bigger
Recovery partition) thus ShadowProtect couldn't do the restore. Had to
quit ShadowProtect and boot up the new drive so I could run a partition
manager to resize the partitions.

3. Reran the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment and was able to
successfully restore the C: partition with my image.

4. Booted back up to windows and reinstalled the past months updates, etc.

5. Made a new image successfully in a significantly shorter time. Also
ran the HDTune function with no problems. So I guess the old SSD was bad.

What is interesting is that I don't ever recall a conventional HDD going
bad. This was my second SSD and it went bad despite the hype about
better reliability. Also, the new drive appears to be faster and I have
5 or 6 GB more space on my C: partition - maybe the old drive was eating
up space because of the defects.

Anyway, so far, so good and quite a learning experience.

Thanks,
Harvey

To put this in perspective, the SSD has its own computer
inside, and runs its own firmware. A firmware bug can
cause a problem for the SSD.

The activities inside the SSD are not necessarily single
threaded. The SSD may need to work on its garbage
collection, if the user is hammering the drive.
So there's a bit going on inside the thing.
For a typical "idle" SSD (not being benchmarked
with random 4K writes), it won't have a lot to
clean up inside.

It's really no different than hard drives, and
recent hard drives have had firmware problems
too. Such as one drive, where a data structure
got corrupted under certain conditions. There
was at least one Seagate, that could brick itself
in about a month of usage. A Seagate employee
reported the conditions needed to trigger it.
A firmware update fixed it.

For SSDs, there are two kinds of firmware updates.
One is "data destructive" and you do a backup
before loading the new firmware. The other is
"data safe", which for any prudent user means
doing a backup before running it The
"data destructive" case just means that
they needed to create new management data
structures inside, blowing away all the old
information in the process.

That's why, for both kinds of storage devices,
you need to read the reviews and look for
potential problems. Both SSDs and HDDs can
get firmware updates.

It's not like optical drives however. With
optical drives, development is not finished
when the drive is released for sale. Not
all the media tags are supported out of the
box. A user does a firmware update on those,
first thing (for brands that offer firmware
updates). Occasionally, you run into products
for which no files were ever released, making
you wonder what you're missing in terms of
support. Not that many years ago, there was
a difference in "burn success" after the
latest firmware was loaded.

Paul

 

[Harvey Gratt]

To put this in perspective, the SSD has its own computer
inside, and runs its own firmware. A firmware bug can
cause a problem for the SSD.

The activities inside the SSD are not necessarily single
threaded. The SSD may need to work on its garbage
collection, if the user is hammering the drive.
So there's a bit going on inside the thing.
For a typical "idle" SSD (not being benchmarked
with random 4K writes), it won't have a lot to
clean up inside.

It's really no different than hard drives, and
recent hard drives have had firmware problems
too. Such as one drive, where a data structure
got corrupted under certain conditions. There
was at least one Seagate, that could brick itself
in about a month of usage. A Seagate employee
reported the conditions needed to trigger it.
A firmware update fixed it.

For SSDs, there are two kinds of firmware updates.
One is "data destructive" and you do a backup
before loading the new firmware. The other is
"data safe", which for any prudent user means
doing a backup before running it The
"data destructive" case just means that
they needed to create new management data
structures inside, blowing away all the old
information in the process.

That's why, for both kinds of storage devices,
you need to read the reviews and look for
potential problems. Both SSDs and HDDs can
get firmware updates.

It's not like optical drives however. With
optical drives, development is not finished
when the drive is released for sale. Not
all the media tags are supported out of the
box. A user does a firmware update on those,
first thing (for brands that offer firmware
updates). Occasionally, you run into products
for which no files were ever released, making
you wonder what you're missing in terms of
support. Not that many years ago, there was
a difference in "burn success" after the
latest firmware was loaded.

Paul

The new SSD was obtained under warranty (the warranty has now more than
paid for itself). In fact the laptop is now 2.5 yrs old and the warranty
is good for another 2.5 yrs. - so there was not much point in shopping
around.

I did notice that DELL does not have any firmware updates listed for
this model (a relatively new model from Liteon). The tech I spoke with
also indicated that there was not much in the way of problems with their
SSD's - I guess I just got a bad one.

Thanks,
Harvey

 

[Robin Bignall]

[..]

Anyway, so far, so good and quite a learning experience.

Excellent news.