Answer|Will abnormal power failure affect SSD?

2022-11-23 17:23

The emergence and development of SSD solid-state drives have brought users an unprecedented revolution in reading and writing speeds compared to traditional HDD mechanical hard drives. However, SSDs have always faced greater risks, and abnormal power failures are fatal. ring.


If the computer is not shut down normally due to unexpected power outages, blue screens of death, etc., it can be called abnormal power outages, and SSD is integrated circuit storage, which needs to be continuously powered on during the read and write process, so once abnormal power outages occur, it will not only cause The unsaved data in the SSD will be lost, and in extreme cases, the previously written data will be wrong, making the SSD unrecognizable by the system.


In layman's terms, SSD will become a "brick" completely, and it is almost impossible to save data, unlike mechanical disks, which can still find ways to recover.



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So, why does abnormal power failure cause so much damage to SSD?


This is mainly because the SSD has set up an FTL table (Link Table) in the internal DRAM cache, which is responsible for recording the metadata necessary for the normal operation of the SSD. Although it has nothing to do with user data, it plays an important role in the normal operation of the SSD. missing role.


After an abnormal power failure, the metadata in the FTL table is easily lost or damaged, and the SSD naturally cannot read and write normally.



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If the SSD is damaged or bricked due to an abnormal power failure, the most effective emergency method is to try to repair the damaged FTL table after the power is restored, but this process takes a certain amount of time, so there is a "power on for 30 minutes idle" The practice is that after the power is restored, do not rush to do any operations on the SSD, first let it stand still for about half an hour.


But this emergency method is not guaranteed to be successful, so on the one hand, during the use of SSD, we should pay attention to prevent accidental power failure as much as possible, on the other hand, we can also consider buying SSD equipped with tantalum capacitor power-down protection, but only for some High-end SSDs and enterprise-grade SSDs.