SSD Failure Sunday 02/05/23

Today marks the first significant breakdown for 2023. It happened to be my computer. On Sunday morning I went to power up my PC to read the news but instead of doom scrolling I simply go the message to insert a boot disk and hit any key… uh oh. I remember what that means. Back in the day it was possible to insert a floppy disk into your pc and boot up DOS or even older windows versions. My pc doesn’t even have a floppy disk or DVD drive. I was screwed and I knew what the problem was right away. My beloved SSD bit the dust.

SSDs are solid state storage devices that are very quick. If you want a fast boot up, you are using an SSD. My SSD was a 250 GB device and several years old. I knew this day would come but expected a little bit of warning. Instead it was an instant failure. I live in the country so getting to a brick and mortar store to buy the required components is difficult. I could have ordered what I needed but shipping takes time. There isn’t same day or next day service out here. Luckily I had a trip planned to go to Dallas and figured I could just pick up everything I needed at the local Best Buy.

Best Buy had the SSD but I also needed a new Windows operating system since I had no idea where my windows media and license key disappeared to after our move. Not to mention, windows 10 is falling out of support so I might as well update to windows 11. Some sage advise was to simply purchase the OS online and download it. You can tell folks have never lived outside of a city when you get advice like that. The high speed internet in rural America is a 2 lane Farm to Market road at best. No thanks, I don’t want to spend the next several days with a download. It turns out Best Buy had the drive I wanted but didn’t have the OS I wanted. Since Frys is now out of business I thought I was out of luck until someone suggested Micro Center. That was perfect and on the way home. Micro Center did have my equipment needed and $200 later I had what I needed to get the job done.

The install was relatively quick and getting windows setup as lightning fast. After the PC was finally ready to use I began the task of installing apps and looking for back ups. I have a separate back up drive that I use for my files and I was alarmed that I couldn’t find my documents there. I was able to find photos and materials related to my business but not my personal documents. Uh oh. I figured I was going to have to retrieve data from the SSD. I spent hours researching how to do this. The next day I was poking around on my system and ran across the documents I was missing. How did they get there? I had to pat myself on the back because while I directed the near TB of data to my local drive as backup I also directed my lighter storage load to synchronize with one drive. I had copies all along. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Now that I have my pc recovered I am very happy with Windows 11 and cloud storage. As a word of advice, make sure you are making backups and your checking that your backed up data is available. In my case it was and I didn’t need to pay $$$ to have my data retrieved by some service.