- Aug 25, 2001
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I mentioned this in a post in another thead, but I got to thinking, it's an interesting example of how SATA is inherently superior to consumer PCI-E SSDs, really. It's all due to the inherent hot-swappability of SATA.
I had a TLC 2.5" SATA SSD, plugged into a test rig, that hadn't been booted in nearly a year. Well, you know TLC, it degrades from being non-powered, and when I finally fired it up, it was having severe trouble. It couldn't really boot Windows, would hang at 7% at the disk check stage, etc. A real mess.
So I booted a Linux Mint distro off of USB, and had another donor working SATA SSD plugged in, and then I hot-swapped the "bad" drive in at the last minute before executing HDPARM commands, to Secure Erase the drive.
That apparently "took", and I was then able to re-install Windows 10 onto it. After installing Windows 10, some things were taking a "long time", but then eventually things smoothed over.
Oh, and at the disk partitioning scheme, I created partitions, formatted them, then deleted them and re-created them, which should have triggered a full TRIM pass over those partition areas too.
It works now.
If I had a PCI-E M.2 TLC SSD (I do own several of these), and it "died" from dis-use / being powered-down too long, then I'm not really sure how I would "revive" it. I mean, I don't believe that M.2 PCI-E slots are hot-swappable in consumer motherboards, and you can't use HDPARM's secure-erase command tools on an NVMe SSD anyways. So I would be stuck, throwing the drive away.
I had a TLC 2.5" SATA SSD, plugged into a test rig, that hadn't been booted in nearly a year. Well, you know TLC, it degrades from being non-powered, and when I finally fired it up, it was having severe trouble. It couldn't really boot Windows, would hang at 7% at the disk check stage, etc. A real mess.
So I booted a Linux Mint distro off of USB, and had another donor working SATA SSD plugged in, and then I hot-swapped the "bad" drive in at the last minute before executing HDPARM commands, to Secure Erase the drive.
That apparently "took", and I was then able to re-install Windows 10 onto it. After installing Windows 10, some things were taking a "long time", but then eventually things smoothed over.
Oh, and at the disk partitioning scheme, I created partitions, formatted them, then deleted them and re-created them, which should have triggered a full TRIM pass over those partition areas too.
It works now.
If I had a PCI-E M.2 TLC SSD (I do own several of these), and it "died" from dis-use / being powered-down too long, then I'm not really sure how I would "revive" it. I mean, I don't believe that M.2 PCI-E slots are hot-swappable in consumer motherboards, and you can't use HDPARM's secure-erase command tools on an NVMe SSD anyways. So I would be stuck, throwing the drive away.