My fairly new (~3 months) OCZ Vertex 2 SSD hard drive (sand force) bricked and no computer you plug it into recognizes it. Is there any good software and/or services that work well for recovering data from these solid state drives? Anyway to recover the data as a ghost image of the entire hard drive would be ideal.
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SSD Data Recovery options?
- Thread starter dejacky
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cicatriz63
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Is the drive listed in device manager or the BIOS at all? I have had success recovering data from a bad samsung ssd using GetDataBack for NTFS. Getting any kind of working image is highly unlikely, youre most likely looking at just pulling individual files.
cicatriz63,
no computer recognizes the hard drive to even boot or access from it. eek $1,500 is way over my budget. I still cannot believe a new ocz ssd drive failed like this after I made sure to use all the correct settings. Any other cheaper recovery options?
no computer recognizes the hard drive to even boot or access from it. eek $1,500 is way over my budget. I still cannot believe a new ocz ssd drive failed like this after I made sure to use all the correct settings. Any other cheaper recovery options?
Usually when a drive will not detect at all it means that something on the controller board has died.
If it is possible to only replace the controller board with one from the same exact model, you may be able to recover your data no problem.
If it is possible to only replace the controller board with one from the same exact model, you may be able to recover your data no problem.
drescherjm
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I do not believe your settings had anything to do with the death of the drive. Meaning this does not sound like the NAND wore out. It sounds like some type of controller failure as the previous poster said.
Well that kinda sucks... I haven't had the chance to mess with a SSD yet so I wasn't sure if it was possible or not.
OCZ offers no data recovery service and they won't answer their phones or emails regarding my tech questions...maybe a lot of their ssd drives fail under warranty and they're too busy with rma's? 
Hopefully, they offer some kind of help by tomorrow..
Hopefully, they offer some kind of help by tomorrow..I had two OCZ drives fail in that exact manner - just completely dead. I was able to get them to be recognized in debug mode (or something similarly named - you can google it) but I wasn't able to flash them to a different firmware (which some users claimed could make the drives readable again).
Forceman, thanks for your info. So, you were never able to recover any data from the drive, correct?
No. I had backups, but the drives were completely kaput.
If memory serves correctly when something goes wrong with the drive they go into a 'panic' mode where the contents become encrypted and read only and the only people that could potentially see what is on the drive is OCZ or SandForce. OCZ will tell you there is nothing to do. Just RMA the drive and get a replacement and make sure to keep backups.
DaRuSsIaMaN
[H]ard|Gawd
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Wait. Really? Lol, so does that mean that every time people RMA a dead vertex 2 drive, OCZ could be examining all the data on that drive, if they wanted to? Because they could read the encrypted data?
Of course, it's also substantially slower.
I would compare consumer grade SSDs with consumer grade tasks like: windows boot times, gaming level load times and a real multitasking suite like Anadtech's.
No use counting 30k+ IOPS as a "feature", when the average queue depth for a home Pc is 3.
When moving a 700MB movie the Vertex 3 is , say 0.6s faster than a 320 series SSD.
Naturally that 0.6s is way more important to some people than the 0.6% RMA rate of Intel drives
DaRuSsIaMaN
[H]ard|Gawd
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Yeah that's what I was talking about as well. Comparisons such as this:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-120gb/11
How about these?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-120gb/12
I wont star a flaming war. Instead lets check the facts for these 2 120Gb drives.
1- Price on Newegg today.
Vertex 3 $269.99
Intel 320 $224.9
2- Price on ebay today, including shipping, only USA dealers, Buy it now:
Vertex 3 $279
Intel 320 $202
considering that last week Newegg offered the Intel 320 series 120Gb for $169, while no similar deal for the Vertex 3 is expected, given huge demand for people who should now better, one must expect to pay today at least 25% more for a vertex 3 over the base price of an Intel 320 series.
So the question becomes: can the Vertex 3 offer at least 25% more performance over the Intel 320 series?
According to Anandtech, whose opinion on SSDs both of us respect a lot;NOPE:
"The gaming workload is made up of 75,206 read operations and only 4,592 write operations. Only 20% of the accesses are 4KB in size, nearly 40% are 64KB and 20% are 32KB. A whopping 69% of the IOs are sequential, meaning this is predominantly a sequential read benchmark. The average queue depth is 7.76 IOs.
A quick check on average IOPS for the gaming suite of ATs bench:
Vertex 3 120Gb- 323 IOPS
Intel 320 318 IOPS
This gigantic gaming performance gap of 1.5% only occurs at one benchmark in the entire AT suite of tests. On all the others tests Intel has better real life results than Vertex 3
Looking at raw performance numbers the Vertex 3 looks like a monster:
It is 4-5 times faster than Intel at random writes.
It is 1.5 times faster at sequential read.
But the 120Gb Vertex 3 has random reads 33% worst than Intel !. Quoting AT:
"Random read performance is what suffered the most with the transition from 240GB to 120GB. The 120GB Vertex 3 is slower than the 120GB Corsair Force F120 (SF-1200, similar to the Vertex 2) in our random read test. The Vertex 3 is actually about the same speed as the old Indilinx based Nova V128 here."
dont be fooled by these numbers: most of the write performance gains on Vertex comes from data compression, and most if not all of big files, such mkv, avi, mpg, mp3 and iso are already compressed. No way small files are going to impact systems with 8Gb+ of RAM, which explaim why the huge performance numbers only translate in meager real life gains.
The Vertex 3 does not endure long term usage with nearly as much grace as Intel:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-120gb/13
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review/11
After a few weeks, expect to see the Vertex 3 work at 130Mb/s while the Intel 320 will keep up 180Mb/s. All the while with Intel using a more conservative idle garbage collection strategy:
"Intel prefers cleaning up as late as possible to extend drive longevity"
Speaking of data safety features, both SSD get RAISE, which means that there is at least one NAND in reserve in case of a chip failure and while Vertex 3 has 7% spare area, Intel goes for 12% spare area-again increasing drive longevity. And of course only Intel 320, of all the consumer priced SSDs, has an array of 6 capacitors to prevent data loss during power failure.
"Intel always prided itself on not storing any user data in its DRAM cache. The external DRAM is only used to cache mapping tables and serve as the controller's scratchpad. In the event of a sudden loss of power, Intel only has to commit whatever data it has in its SRAM to NAND. To minimize the amount of data loss in the event of a sudden power failure, Intel outfitted the SSD 320 with an array of six 470µF capacitors in parallel.
We've seen large capacitors on SSDs before, primarily the enterprise SandForce drives that boast a 0.09F supercap. Intel claims that for its design a single large capacitor isn't necessary given the minimal amount of data that's cached. It further claims that an array of multiple capacitors in parallel allows for much better reliability - if one capacitor fails the array is still useful (vs. a single point of failure in the case of the supercap)."
-"I want to have a 6Gb/s SSD, even if it costs more, lasts less and fails a lot more."
-Great, the Vertex 3 is your drive. Just remember that Crucial's m4 ís the king of the Hill for random rights, so limited bragging rights for you...
"I want to pay less and get a drive that lasts more"
Intel 320 anyone?
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DaRuSsIaMaN
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Alright. Probably a good point. Just a couple things, though. Firstly, we can't quite make direct comparisons yet. You're comparing ~250ish GB intel drives to a 120gb vertex3. It's improper because performances drop for all models as size decreases.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4256/the-ocz-vertex-3-review-120gb/14
True, I was making such a comparison myself by pointing to the Mark Vantage chart. But I was being qualitative: just saying that it looks like there's a notable performance advantage in favor the vertex3 (120gb) from that chart. You're being quantitative and trying to compare % differences in performance. For that we would need to wait until AT has 120gb intel drives reviews finished, and then make a direct comparison between equal sizes.
Secondly:
Um, I believe this would only be true in a worst-case scenario, if you do specific things like write lots of "truly random data" or store a lot of "highly compressed files". You make it sound like the performance drop is a foregone conclusion.
***
Anyway, question. Do those PCMark Vantage numbers scale linearly? If there is an x% difference between scores, does that imply the same x% difference in performance or time to complete a task?
Yeah, and since we're on [hard], what would really be interesting is an fps graph to see if there are differences.
OnTrack and Drivesavers will not touch that drive for under 3k in my experience.