“We just have to hope the in convenience isn’t enough to leave us a terrible review”

Deep in the archive of your prized collection of PC Pro magazine will be issue 318. If you flip to page 114, you’ll be reminded about the influx of SSDs that failed long before their time.

Unfortunately, they’re still coming, and I’ve had a few adventures trying to put things right. From a service perspective, a customer has bought a part that has died before its warranty expired and, quite rightly, they’re annoyed about it. From my perspective, I need to keep the customer happy while replacing the drive in the shortest time possible. From a cold-hearted, financial viewpoint, I’ve paid for two drives and performed two lots of labour for the price of one. Multiply this by the quantity of unexpected failures (that are not my fault) and it’s clear that this is getting to be rather expensive. Before you all pass around the collection plate, I will (eventually) get refunded for the cronked drives, but there’s a positive to this fiscal apocalypse that I’m excited to share: I’ve unearthed a software bug. We’ll get to that later.

To understand), about common causes of SSD failure. “If they have not failed due to physical damage (such as liquid ingress or power/electrical problems) then the most common faults tend to be firmware/controller and chip-based [degradation].” This is certainly the case here. The drives look wonderfully pristine; maybe that’s due to the lack of effort they’ve been putting in.