Solid State drive failure

The solid state drive (Intel X25-M 80G G1) in my Thinkpad X61t failed yesterday. I should have seen it coming. The computer was very slow Sunday night and I had to turn it off. It never waked up, at least not completely, from that. On Monday morning, it managed to get to the log on screen and after entering Windows password, it just hang. After restarting a few times, the laptop won't recognize it any more.

Luckily, I still kept the old 100GB drive with Vista Enterprise on it. Replacing the hard drive took about 2 minutes and it booted up slowly but without incident. Of course it immediately asked for updates but it's not a problem.

Peter, a co-worker, is trying to revive it but I won't hold my breath. When connected to his eSATA connector as an external drive

I actually ordered a new Thinkpad X201 to replace it and it's on the way over. I was going to backup all the files over the weekend but got distracted. Although almost everything work related has been backed up, I do have two folders that are not. One of them has my temporary work files and the other contains all pictures I took this year.

This is a 14 months old drive purchased in August 2009, when the original 100GB 7200rpm drive in the X61 started to have problems. I've done quite some research on the SSD technology and decided to give it a try so I can boost the lifetime of the then 3-yr old X61 for another year or two. The decision to go for the more expensive Intel X-25M, one of the more expensive SSD at the time, is mostly based on this review of SSD technology by AnandTech.

Combined with Windows 7, the X25-M did seem faster than the old 7200rpm drive but I'm not sure this is because of the SSD or the performance improvement by Windows 7 over Vista. When installing the SSD, it doesn't seem to be much lighter than the 7200rpm drive but definitely quieter. It's cooler, at least initially.

Over the course of next a few months, the X61 became more and more hot at the center of the laptop. Now when I look back, it probably have issues there since although the drive was cool, but the driver circuit was hot and the motherboard was working very hard.

Now that the drive is dead, it turns out that recovering data from a failed solid state drives are much more difficult than a conventional magnetic disk drive. There are not much options and I'm not willing to shell off 3 grands to use a data recovery service. The next step would be downloading some Intel utilities for drive management but I am not sure it will work. I also found some data recovery software online but none of them specifically say that it will work for SSD, which use a much different data mapping algorithm. I may have to format the drive just to have it recognizable by Windows before trying the software. Will wait for a few days before bite the bullet to do that. Besides, the external network at work was down after 1pm. It hasn't recovered as yet (7am the next day). Guess this is really not my day!

I do have other laptops to get by and I have a new laptop coming on Wednesday. Hopefully this would hold on a bit longer. My first X30 worked flawlessly (on XP Pro) for 4 years before I passed it on to my Dad, who's still using it (7 years now). This one had a hard drive failure in the 3rd year and another failure in the 4th year.

It's time to say good bye.