THIS SOLID STATE DRIVE IN OUR HOME OFFICE SYSTEM FAILED SUDDENLY
Diverging for a moment from our usual more lighthearted subject matter, I felt it important to share this real-life experience in the hopes it might save you much time and money, and bring you peace of mind.
One of my myriad hats is that of a computer professional. It started in the late 80s when desktop computer technology was beginning to empower people with tools to create professional graphic design and typography work. I had been publishing my recording studio newsletter and traditional methods of preparing camera-ready shooting boards for printing were costing a good deal of money. It looked like with a computer and the right software, I could do graphic design, typesetting, and database management of all of my contacts.
This was in the days of floppy disk storage and very expensive hard drives with a whopping storage capacity of 10mb!
I learned early on about backing up data. Software applications didn't have to be backed up because if anything happened to the drive, programs could be reinstalled from their original discs. But whatever was created using the software was saved in some kind of computer file format and that had to be backed up and stored safely. My first backup system used floppy discs and I had over 30 of them for each backup!
Over the years, disc capacities, backup tools and strategies kept evolving, but I always had some kind of redundancy. That is until things got so busy that backing up religiously kinda fell off the radar.
One of the strategies was to replace as many drives as possible with newer, faster, more reliable drives. Just a few years ago, I replaced the hard drives for 3 of our computer systems with Solid State Drives (SSDs). Unlike hard discs, SSDs have no moving parts so theoretically, they should last longer than mechanical drives. Unfortunately, a couple weeks ago, I found that not to be the case.
The very drive pictured above suddenly became inaccessible. It contained 2 virtual drives with the programs on "drive C" and data files on "drive D." But when I rebooted the computer, I got the dreaded black screen with a message: "cannot locate the boot drive." This is not a message you ever want to see! For all practical purposes, this SSD drive was DEAD.
Even trying every YouTube "How to access your inaccessible drive" video, this drive was not going to be communicated with.
Most of the data on this drive hadn't been backed up in a while. Oops...
Fortunately, the hard drive the SSD replaced was still in the computer case and I plugged it in so the programs would be accessible. The data on that drive, however, was 4 years old!
Alright... time to investigate Data Recovery companies for the SSD. Ouch! Most started at $1000 and went up from there! I'm sure it's well worth it if they're the only ones who can pull your data out of a locked hat! But that was not in my budget.
So I kept looking and I eventually found 300 Dollar Data Recovery in Studio City.