Printable View
We recently picked up ~140 SSD (256 GB) from a customer, and their method of protecting their data was to damage the SATA connectors. I'm not sure how to sell these, and I'd like some suggestions on what to do with these. I don't like the idea of putting them all on ebay and risk exposing the customers data. It would be nice if there was an easy way of fixing them.
well if the customer was worried about their data to the point of intentionally damaging the connectors, maybe you should just honor them and scrap them without taking any chances. Take your 4lbs and be happy enough with that I suppose.
Solid state drives have the connectors integrated onto the board, I doubt there is a way to fix these. I also think that your customer did not intend for them to be re used.
"Assuming" I know what you are asking is a bit wrong at this moment. So here's a couple ideas/questions. If the customer requires them to be damaged to safeguard the information then do that(as others have stated).
If after the drives have been sufficiently damaged you could remove any outside case and save them up and ship them with other high grade material to the buyer of your choice. I highly recommend you use one of the members who advertise on the forum, read the feed back in their threads.
If all the customer wants is to safeguard the information and say doing a DOD type wipe on them is good enough then perhaps you can re-sell them as used on eBay.
From you stated questions I am uncertain what exactly you have in mind. Mike.
PS Physical destruction is a good method of safeguarding the information on the drives. Mike
There's probably not an easy, cost-effective way of fixing them. But for your (and your customer's) future reference, modern SATA/PATA drives have something called Secure Erase built into their firmware, which completely eliminates all data. Executing Secure Erase on an SSD will reset all of its memory cells and return it to its factory-default state. Secure Erase is one of the NIST-approved methods for drive sanitization; the other is degaussing.
Argh there went a couple grand worth of usable drives :(
I guess I wasn't that clear. This is my first experience with solid state media. All magnetic drives get DOD wiped if they are resellable or the platters get destroyed if they are not. I'm frustrated because it seems like the connector destruction was a half-measure. The customers data is still there if someone was motivated to solder on a new connector (however unlikely). And yet they are too damaged to be wiped and resold.
Also, I know these drives are very expensive to produce. 140 drives at $0.75 per gigabyte is $26800 (retail new). I was hoping for some ideas on how to sell these so that I can get more than a few dollars per pound for the lot. And also not compromise the customers data.
I know, a quandary. Thanks for all your input.
I had a state of the art SSD drive it barely lasted 4 yrs. I used it a lot, but a mechanical drive would have lasted longer
Carson I would like to hear more about your experience with the SSD. I have assumed that SSD's would last longer than mechanical Hard Drives.Quote:
Originally Posted by carson
If you have a lot of information to share you may want to start you own thread. Mike
I have an SSD (and I know quite a bit about them) and here is the REASON (most likely) yours did not last as long as a mechanical drive. SSD drives have essentially cells in them that fail over time because they have a certain number of "writes" they can take. If a cell fails, the drive compensates for that and ignores it (this a bad sector on a mechanical drive). Some bad cells are fine, but too many and it cannot handle the moving and temp storage of that data...essentially if you have a drive like a DATA drive that you write alot of stuff to (save and deleting files), then you should not use an SSD for that. The best combination is to have a SSD drive for you OS and programs (stuff that doesn't get deleted and saved to alot) and have you data on a mechanical drive.
I have this setup and it is SREAMINGLY fast. The programs open very quickly...these are what counts in the "speed" people talk about...my data drive is a very fast mechanical drive that is still REALLY fast because it just has to grab the file I want to work on from it and not load the program form it as well.
Moral of the story...is a SSD for OS and program and then have a 2nd drive for your data. You should get a somewhat comparable life if you do this..granted many mechanical drives work for FAR longer than they are technically supposed to (SSD drives do as well in the test I have seen...almost 75-100% MORE writes/erases than the manufacturer speced it for). The point is, mechanical drive MIGHT still function, but after several years they are like a ticking timebomb....they can start to have bad sectors or other things out of the blue and then your data can be unreadable. You CAN fix some mechanical drive if you REALLY know what you are doing, but not for the amateur. When SSD cells go bad..well they are just bad.
Didn't mean to hijack the thread...thought that info would be useful to everyone.
The current drive are probably not something you want to try to fix...would require some technical knowledge to desolder the sata port and then resolder a new one onto the board. I know they CAN be reused, but the EXPENSE might make the profitability moot. Hard to say...if you KNOW someone that has he expertise, then by all means...otherwise...scrap and move on.
( Thread drift warning.)
It's a little off topic but i was reading the other day that a few bad sectors on a mechanical drive are normal. A brand new platter surface is quite good but it's not perfect. Apparently there are "spare sectors" built in and as the computer encounters a bad sector it pulls it out of service and transfers the data to one of the spares.
An aging drive might have used up all of it's spares so that would be a problem.
By that reasoning, the S.M.A.R.T. looks like it would be the best indicator of the condition of the drive be it either mechanical -or- SSD ?
Yes you are correct...all drive have some extra sectors it remaps the data form bad sectors to. Mechanical drive slow down because the drive head has to find a different track for the moved data while SSD doesn't work that way hence no speed degradation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scrappah
Both SSD and Mechanical drives utilize S.M.A.R.T. you can download any number of free and professional programs to run S.M.A.R.T. testing to help indicate the health of a drive.
I personally love gSmartControl. Some reallocated sectors aren't necessarily a big deal, but looking at the SMART report will usually let you see the bigger picture.
As for the SSDs in question, I think they're scrap. I cringe saying that, but unless you can do the soldering yourself, you'll likely spend more than the drives are worth. :(
I don't have any experience with the SSD's but i know that the logic board on a mechanical drive is replaceable. The firmware that acts something like a BIOS & tells the HDD how to operate is stored in permanent memory so that info does need to be transferred to the donor board. ( It's not necessarily a big cost. ) The same thing might be possible with a SSD.
Doesn't seem like soldering in a new connector would be a reliable way of doing it. If there was enough force used to damage the connector it's likely that the circuit board was damaged as well.
On the spare sectors issue: I've been wiping quite a few 160 Gb lately. It's interesting because after all of the partitions have been removed they report as actually having a capacity of a 148 gb. I thought that it might be a thing where the manufacturers routinely overstate the capacity of the drive but i'm starting to wonder if the missing 12 gb is actually the HDD's store of reserve sectors.
That would give you enough of a reserve that the drive would last a long time as long as it didn't suffer a head crash into the platter.
( ie: a running laptop got accidentally dropped on the floor and the head crashes creating a cyclic redundancy error on the drive.)
Reserve sectors being brought into service don't necessarily have to cause the drive to slow down. I've found that if you routinely defragment a drive it keeps the files from being splashed all over the disk. The worst offenders for fragmentation are the pagefile.sys, system volume information, & hiberfil.sys files. If you delete those before derfragmenting you can usually get drive file fragementation well below 1%.
I recently purchased two new 480gb SSD's and using them in my two main computers. One is an all in one and the other is a ASUS laptop with 6gb ram with Windows 8.1. Its been a couple of months and so far so good. Start up is quicker and no worries if you shut it down and re-start it immediately.
I got them because I had no previous experience with SSD's and wanted to do testing then use them for a while. Mike