external SSD just went dead

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by chris.d

3x Icy Box IB-1817Ma-C31 external enclosures containing
3x SSD V7 V7SSD2TBNV4E

SSDs are incredibly complex systems. And since they you know... are trusted with keeping your data safe. Why are you buying off-brand V7/Ingram drives and not say drives from a leading manufacturer like Samsung? I have no idea who actually manufactures the V7 drives or who's software/firmware they are running.

Is the firmware up to date? It's not unusual for any SSD model to have updated firmware to solve bugs including corruption/data loss. Nice thing about Samsung is they develop/own the entire stack including all firmware so can get fixes out independent of anybody else.

You've got a Mac with Thunderbolt 3 capability but you have these drives running at USB 3.x speeds, 10Gbit/s at most with these USB enclosures, I'd personally have used Thunderbolt 3 enclosures or chassis. And I might prefer the larger chassis if only because they can be harder to bump/pull out a cable accident. Although all USB-C connections are unfortunately risky.

These drives are separate JBOD right? So only one drive failed. If you want to keep going with it I would check its firmware is up to date, and reformat it and see how it goes, maybe running some tests on it. I have no idea if V7 provides any diag software, you can ask their support. Check the Console.app logs for any errors that look like this. Or you could look for a Thunderbolt solution and/or better brand SSDs. Personally if me I'd return the drive that failed and either replace under warranty or get a refund and buy a Samsung 990 Pro or 980 Pro.

As for rating the wear life time of any SSD... that's data the manufacturer would supply (e.g. in total data writes or similar) and you can do a back of the envelope guesstimate how long this should last for your write workload. For most folks here with our workloads the wear life is so large it's just not interesting. Wear lifetime is unlikely to be related to anything here. Either you have hardware failure (esp. the early part of "bathtub failure") or something has happened to the drive... like maybe being corrupted by unplugging when in use, a fault in the enclosure that damaged the drive etc. There is no way (without detailed manufacturer data which they typically do not provide) to predict actual early failure rates of SSDs, the best thing you can do is use very well known/widely used/well supported drives like a Samsung 980 Pro or 990 Pro.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by chris.d

SSD may die


what does that mean?
are we back in early 2000s?


i lost several HDs back then just like that. since 15y i never ever experienced failing of a HD, except for now as i switched to M.2 SSDs

You seem to have a pretty unrealistic model of reliability. So you got lucky with HDD over the last 15 years? How many thousands of drives have you used to get good statistics on how reliable they are?

All storage devices can fail. Quality consumer SSDs are likely more reliable that consumer HDD, but that depends on usage. Again, any external drive, especially with USB-C connections is likely to be less reliable than internal drives.

All electronics products will show increased early failure rates, that's the bathtub failure curve. You should not be surprised when new things fail. Return them under warranty... that's especially what a warranty is intended to address.

[JFreak]

Guaranteed Darryl reality check, pay attention everyone.

[chris.d]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

Sorry to hear that. I had a very important drive go south a couple months ago and nothing helped. I tried all the usual suspects. Then I tried Disk Drill. The entire process of finding/rebuilding/copying the data took several days to complete but from what I can tell *all* files were copied from the supposedly "unreadable" drive to a brand new one. A real life saver.

i tried three enclosures and two macs, but nothing...

[chris.d]

Your Feedback is highly appreciated

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Why are you buying off-brand V7/Ingram drives and not say drives from a leading manufacturer like Samsung?

probably marketing and because i'm a mixing engineer and not a computer scientist
the specs were looking good, some youtube clips... whatever.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

You've got a Mac with Thunderbolt 3 capability but you have these drives running at USB 3.x speeds, 10Gbit/s at most with these USB enclosures, I'd personally have used Thunderbolt 3 enclosures or chassis. And I might prefer the larger chassis if only because they can be harder to bump/pull out a cable accident

i was testing my HHDs read/writespeed that allowed me to work for the last 10 years and they were hiting the 150mb/s mark i think. compare that to the real life 2300mb i got with these USB 3, what should i do with 40Gbit/s in audio production? It just made absolutely no sense to go there...

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

These drives are separate JBOD right? So only one drive failed.

One drive and the corresponding enclosure are dead now.
The others work, but i just don't trust them anymore. I will probably try to return. I do have other hobbies than to hunt for firmware.
I ran into the store and bought 2 samsung T7 after the fail,so i could at least get a some work done.
I don't know which route to go from here...

i do have the same chassis you got, but only one pci-slot is left. can you recommend a 4 slot PCI to M.2 card? Or is the heat gonna be too much to handle? 2 UADs plus 3-4 M.2 produce significant heat...

[Darryl Ramm]

Samsung T7 is a great choice for an external USB 3.1 Gen 2 (i.e. 10Gb/s) drive... so compact and nice. But again the chance that a damn USB-C cable could be accidentally unplugged (and I've done that) just bugs me. And USB 3.1 Gen 2 aka 10 Gb/s is the fastest that a mac USB port can drive without going Thunderbolt. Mac's don't support USB 3.1 Gen 2x2, largely for Thunderbolt political reasons.

All vendors should explain/make it easy for you to check the firmware snd warn you to check for upgrades... you did read their install instructions?. You *have* to check the firmware, it's part of owning an SSD, these things are quite complex little computers. Google tells me I have warned about that around 569 of times on DUC, sigh, but I see I have failed. :-( You see the Firmware version with the macOS System Report utility e.g. see it shown here for a different drive: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachm...one-png.889031

Yes the speeds are getting silly fast, but it's not just about speed as a recording volume, many of us appreciate how fast these can be for backup/recover, or for mixing sessions and samples on the same volumes, etc. And faster sample drives can say help stream more samples, but again you may not need these limits.

So the enclosure that housed the drive that failed is not dead even if you swap in other drives? That likely means either of two things...

1. the SSD failed/had some problem and also killed the enclosure
2. the enclosure died and also took out the SSD, or at least scrambled it enough it needs to be reformatted.

I expect #2 is much more likely than #1. Low-end M.2 enclosures are a nice packaged for many uses, yet they are largely made in China "not so good"-ware.

The single M.2 adapter I'd buy is this OWC Thunderbolt 3 one: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/envo.../thunderbolt-3. It is widely used by others on DUC. And OWC gives good support (although I'd still stay with Samsung not OWC M.2 SSDs).

The Sonnet PCIe Chassis are nice for my use, if you don't mind all the M.2 drives in each chassis sharing one Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth.. and for many uses you likely don't. The Sonnet USB-C cable locking screw is a godsend to me, pity you can't lock the other USB-C end into the computer.

I'm not sure exactly what Thunderbolt 3 Sonnet chassis you have, I run multiple of the Sonnet Echo Express SEIIIe Thunderbolt 3 often with just NVMe SSDs int them, but also sometimes Ethernet NICs etc, I also have Some other GPU chassis that I use at times. My gut says don't stack up all those DSP cards and M.2 drives. The simple way to start is to just use the unused slot with a single slot M.2 adapter and see how that goes. And those adapters are low-cost ~$US15 because they are really nothing except a PCB and connectors. This is the one I use: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01I5VABFY. If you want to run a multi-M.2 adapter card in so that each M.2 drives on the card can get up to the peak total bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 you need a PCIe switch based PCIe adapter card which will start at two hundreds of dollars or so for a dual M.2 adapter card. So start with the ~$15 one. And it's always good to have one of those dumb cards for testing SSDs with anyhow. And if you want the chunkier chassis approach you could add another compact chassis like mine with 3 x M.2 cards on single slot adapters in it. Id' do that before trying out multi-M.2 adapter cards. I love how quiet mine run... I'd run the M.2 drives with heatsinks on them.

[chris.d]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Samsung T7 ....

You're the man!!


quite some stuff to digest... it's gonna keep me busy for some time

[chris.d]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

So the enclosure that housed the drive that failed is not dead even if you swap in other drives? That likely means either of two things...

1. the SSD failed/had some problem and also killed the enclosure
2. the enclosure died and also took out the SSD, or at least scrambled it enough it needs to be reformatted.

No, or Yes:


The enclousure IS dead
The SSD IS also dead, doesn't show in System info nor Harddisk Toolkit, therefore i cannot initialize/format

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by chris.d

No, or Yes:


The enclousure IS dead
The SSD IS also dead, doesn't show in System info nor Harddisk Toolkit, therefore i cannot initialize/format

You are testing all these on the same USB port(s) on the Mac (or USB hub if you are using one?) Just want to be absolutely sure you don't have a faulty port.

Uh less confident on guessing what caused that problem then. Hopefully both can be replaced, or better refunded and you can buy some better brand/quality stuff.

[chris.d]

no i tested on a mac mini direct ports and a macbook air direct port...