This week I got some speed reduced SSDs, these SSDs have been gotten from work experience and some of them had a reduced speed which we learned was the SSD detecting that it has hit a threshold of reallocated blocks and power on hours and it reduces its speed to protect itself so that you can get the data off it, we didn’t know why one out of a few dozen SSDs did that until I did some research.
I got a few of them at work experience and I was allowed to have them as they were fully wiped and overwritten which meant they didn’t need to be destroyed, they were going to pull them anyways and recycle them but with the newly obtained knowledge they decided to wipe and recycle these ones (for the curious, we had 20 out of the 500 SSDs we processed (currently dealing with 2500 SSDs from the initial batch) that reduced their speed and these drives were meant to do 1GB/s but reduced themselves to a paltry 100MB/s which is the equivalent of a slow 5400 spinning HDD).
The first long drive at the bottom is a NVMe drive, NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express and that’s a communication standard so that higher speed flash chips can communicate with the computer without the interface standard being a bottleneck, it is capable of 4.0GB/s although the ones we had topped out at around 1GB/s, they came in multiple form factors which is what the small one is, they eventually introduced M.2 and M.3, these drives had a higher transfer speed, many more form factors and different keying configuration for different uses and formats within the standard, the drive above the NVMe drive is a M.2 drive, the one I have has got two keying cutouts on it as it can fit in a higher speed slot which a lower speed drive would not be able to fit in.
The drive above the MLC SSD is a mSATA which was the previous version before NVMe, these drives only had one form factor and its purpose was to make laptops thinner and faster, the drives were quickly replaced by NVMe, although the WiFi card slot on some laptops look similar, they are electrically incompatible and wouldn’t work if you plugged either a mSATA drive into a WiFi slot or a WiFi card into a mSATA drive slot.
There may be more drives of this type to come because my work experience hasn’t gone through all of the 2500 drives and they had just received another 7500 drives to deal with so there will be plenty more speed reduced failing drives to take.
Thank you for reading this Friday‘s post and I hope you have a great day, if you have any queries, thoughts about the format, additional information or to point out a mistake, please put them in the comments :)
Link to previous post, post 10 (22nd week):My data storage mediums, post 10 (22nd week) : r/DataHoarder
All drives
A mSATA drive
A small form factor NVMe drive, I know that there is a size between the two and will try to obtain one
A M.2 and regular NVMe drive, I would be very grateful for all information regarding the different types of NVMe and m.2/3 drives as there are some many form factors, keying and standards that it’s making my head spin (just want to know all types so that I know what to collect and what is basically a duplicate drive with a minor change) and don’t get me started (still happy to get info on them) on Apple proprietary drives
