Vocal Voices

Hi,

On Friday night I came home to find my server which hosts my media machine and my VPN (Virtual Private Network or UK in France), windows XP machine, lying on it's back with it's feet in the air.

After an hour of diagnosis and bodging, I managed to get everything back up and running again.

Today I did a bit of searching for answers and have "repaired" the SSD. I noticed on Friday night that the power had gone off and on again. I know this because my workstation I had been logged into was sitting at the login prompt and put me through the entire first login process. As I only restart the machine every month or two, I know that it restarted.

So with that as a starting point I went looking.

What I found was not very good. I found that SSD's have a problem with unexpected power outages. I suspect it is also to do with how good/stressed your power supply is too. For instance the two SSD in my workstation were OK, but the one in my server was not. My server had 5 x 2TB hard drives in it as well as the SSD.

I found the process to power cycle a SSD and followed it. Without the SATA cable connected, 20 minutes (or so), on then power off for 30 seconds (or so) and power on again. Repeat the process and it's done.

I now have my SSD back.

But the point is this. Before I knew this I pulled the drive from my server and tried it in the USB 3.0 dock beside my workstation. It was not recognised. I have that dock here with me in Belgium and used it to power cycle the drive.

So, anyway, to the point of the article. If you know that you have a SSD and you know you have had a power outage and your drive has mysteriously "vanished", don't suddenly assume you need to buy another one. They are not cheap and they are not dead like a rotating hard drive would be. They are just "stuck" in the middle of a process they can't get out of.

Laptops should be fine as they have a battery and also they do their own clean shut down if the power gets too low.

Now you see, Suff, that is what I was talking about in the other thread - time and mindset.

I would have got all the other stuff working as best it could and then gone off looking for answers and trying things out. If that meant completely borking what looked like an already borked piece of kit I lost nothing but a bit of time, but if I brought it back to life - bonus.

I do often wonder how many things, and not just computing items, get binned because that is how society works these day.

Yep that's the point isn't it.

In real terms this drive is not really worth much. It's a 60GB drive which is the smallest drive I now own. I fixed the server and services at home simply by pulling the drive and starting up the Virtual Machine it was running elsewhere.

To put it into context I was totting up how much drive space I need to fix my broken server here in Brussels. I have 35TB of space allocated between my NAS box and my Laptop and the desk the server is on. Insane in some respects but actually what I need to fix the problem.

I've managed to virtualise all 4 drives, imported them into a virtual virtual server (yep I'm running a virtual server as a virtual machine on my laptop) and I'm pulling the files off the W7 machine running virtually on my virtual virtual server (yes, 2 layers of virtualisation deep).

It's going to take another week or so to get it all swapped around so that I can always keep two copies.

With this post I just wanted to make people aware that this could happen with home PC's and that the drive might be recoverable. This one was only 60GB. What if it was 900GB????

Suff wrote:With this post I just wanted to make people aware that this could happen with home PC's and that the drive might be recoverable. This one was only 60GB. What if it was 900GB????

Yes, as SSDs become more standard these things will happen more often. VMs seem like a good middle man.

I remember 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppies where the middle man was usually a desktop partition or a tape drive (remember those?). Absolutely essential if files were to be kept.

Workingman wrote:or a tape drive (remember those?)

I have a box of DDS2/3 tape drives which I need to recover some day. As my DDS drive died and I had no inclination to pay £200 - £300 to replace it I've been looking on ebay but, again, time is taking over. Getting a SCSI card which has a driver for the later windows is hard. USB2 drives are available but only in the US and that is cost again.

Yes a VM is actually a good storage mechanism. Entire machine and all it's files in one (or more), virtual disk which can simply be backed up and copied to another machine to run. Although an additional backup of the files is always useful. Interestingly the greatest achievement of the xBox One is not anything to do with the games it can play or it's media integration. It is that the machine is a virtual server which runs 3 virtual machines. One for games, one for online services and one other for your web browsing/Skype... I wonder how many people know that???

As people's lives become more and more digital, their need for a backup (photo's, movies from the phone or camera, even emails with received photo's/video clips, which have never been saved), becomes more and more critical. Most people don't even realise they need the capability until it's far too late.

I'm still evolving my process. After buying my NAS I looked around and they sell a 10 drive one for a reasonable price (£700 ish). That would fix almost all my backup requirements forever and it supports RAID levels, hot swap and rebuild. One more for the "Christmas" list....