{"id":172,"date":"2015-01-24T23:20:35","date_gmt":"2015-01-24T22:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lengers.com\/?p=172"},"modified":"2015-12-19T21:56:06","modified_gmt":"2015-12-19T20:56:06","slug":"ssd-boot-drive-of-my-mac-mini-broke-after-8-months-owc-120gb-mercury-electra-6g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lengers.com\/?p=172","title":{"rendered":"SSD Boot drive of my Mac Mini broke after 8 months: OWC 120Gb Mercury Electra 6g"},"content":{"rendered":"

Only 8 months after I installed a brand new OWC 120Gb Mercury Electra 6g<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

\"Smart<\/a><\/p>\n

Hmm not good. Some more tests while S.M.A.R.T. status read out utilities I found on the internet:<\/p>\n

\"bad<\/a><\/p>\n

\"More<\/a><\/p>\n

Since there seemed to be a firmware update<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

So after creating a final Time Machine backup run I took the drive out and send it to the supplied macupgrade.eu<\/a>\u00a0. \u00a0The 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….<\/p>\n

Once more I was amazed how easy it was to restore a mac<\/a>, 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<\/p>\n

\"After:<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n