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FYI, if your SSD suddenly stops showing up (especially after a power off event), then the first thing to try is power cycling it: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-d

FYI, if your SSD suddenly stops showing up (especially after a power off event), then the first thing to try is power cycling it: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/

userbinator 2y ago
That's basically "let the firmware try to sort itself out", which might work if there was temporary corruption in the FTL metadata and it knows enough to try to recover that by doing some sort of block-scanning, but if there's further damage beyond that, it won't have any effect. Still worth a try, however.
rep_lodsb 2y ago
I had an SSD go bad in another way, with requests constantly timing out or returning corrupt data. That started happening more and more frequently, with the system crashing, and after rebooting fsck would show tons of "fun" messages about some file or another being 141831373107584798 bytes large with a modify date years in the future. Managed to get most of the files off to an external hard drive, put the dead one in a drawer and forgot about it. When I recently read about this trick, I figured it couldn't do any harm even if it didn't solve this specific problem - it didn't, and by now the drive failed pretty much immediately when trying to read anything. But that got me trying other things, and what appears to have solved it is using the "hdparm" utility on a Linux install CD to send trim commands for every single sector - pretty much the closest thing to a "low level format" you can get today, AFAIK. For some reason, even with all the confirmation options it demands for safety reasons ("--please-destroy-my-drive"), it will only let you do 65535 at a time, so this required a script to feed it many separate ranges covering the entire space. Ended up with a seemingly perfectly usable blank drive. Obviously, I still don't entirely trust it to keep working, but okay to put in a crappy old laptop with nothing important on it.

userbinator 2y ago

That's basically "let the firmware try to sort itself out", which might work if there was temporary corruption in the FTL metadata and it knows enough to try to recover that by doing some sort of block-scanning, but if there's further damage beyond that, it won't have any effect. Still worth a try, however.

rep_lodsb 2y ago

I had an SSD go bad in another way, with requests constantly timing out or returning corrupt data. That started happening more and more frequently, with the system crashing, and after rebooting fsck would show tons of "fun" messages about some file or another being 141831373107584798 bytes large with a modify date years in the future. Managed to get most of the files off to an external hard drive, put the dead one in a drawer and forgot about it. When I recently read about this trick, I figured it couldn't do any harm even if it didn't solve this specific problem - it didn't, and by now the drive failed pretty much immediately when trying to read anything. But that got me trying other things, and what appears to have solved it is using the "hdparm" utility on a Linux install CD to send trim commands for every single sector - pretty much the closest thing to a "low level format" you can get today, AFAIK. For some reason, even with all the confirmation options it demands for safety reasons ("--please-destroy-my-drive"), it will only let you do 65535 at a time, so this required a script to feed it many separate ranges covering the entire space. Ended up with a seemingly perfectly usable blank drive. Obviously, I still don't entirely trust it to keep working, but okay to put in a crappy old laptop with nothing important on it.