Well that's a first for me, SSD died..

[nerp]

Here I am thinking it's great to finally move away from unreliable HDDs with their tendency to fail and I buy an SSD that up and dies about 30 days after I use it in a new build.

SanDisk Ultra II SSD 250GB was running great and I was enjoying the speed until Thursday when I powered off the machine and when I fired it back up it was no longer appearing in the BIOS. Did the usual troubleshooting, swapping ports, power cables and even testing in a different machine with the same result.

SanDisk RMA process is underway. In the meantime I ordered a Samsung 850 EVO and it arrived today and the system is back up and running. Windows 10 thankfully is a breeze to reinstall. I save all my working files to OneDrive and my settings are all synched with my MS account so it took me less than an hour to be exactly where I was before the failure.

Now the question is what to do with the replacement SanDisk SSD when it arrives. I suppose I will put it in my aging MacBook pro to give it some new life.

On a side note, Windows 10 activated itself automatically and I didn't enter a key upon install, so it is true that a HDD swap won't break activation on a machine.

 

[hojnikb]

activation is tied o the mothermoard, so you'll be fine.

 

[tweakboy]

SanDisk is no good. I bet if you bought a Samsung we wouldnt be talking about this now...

 

[Elixer]

Yeah, SSDs tend to fail hard like that, with no advanced warning. Though, to be fair, HDs can also do this as well.

For SSDs, from what I gather, the problem is in the firmware, it gets to a panic state.
I wonder why they don't have SSDs with a 'recovery' switch on them, that can reset the device. Kinda like having a dual BIOS motherboard.