Only 8 months after I installed a brand new OWC 120Gb Mercury Electra 6g SSD in my Mac mini my system started to behave poorly and slow. It took a while before I figured out the Disk utility showed this:
Hmm not good. Some more tests while S.M.A.R.T. status read out utilities I found on the internet:
Since there seemed to be a firmware update (mine was not at the latest), I went through the trouble of upgrading. But that didn’t clear the SMART status and performance was still very poor.
So after creating a final Time Machine backup run I took the drive out and send it to the supplied macupgrade.eu . The drive was pretty bad so I couldn’t wipe it properly…hmm… They kindly replaced it of course. But since this is my main desktop machine it was a long 2 weeks, with my Mac Mini sitting with its parts inside out on my home desk….
Once more I was amazed how easy it was to restore a mac, booted more or less with the OS downloaded from the internet automatically during re-install. Half a day later I was up and running. Safe and sound with a fast SSD. I do hope the next on lasts a bit longer them
Noteworthy: my backups worked. This is my second SSD still fail in one year, and hardly ever had an HDD fail on me. Mac OS X is very easy to recover.