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Kingspec SSD reliability - IDE PATA SSD - Slow down failed - TRIM, Garbage Collection

KingSpec SSD - Buyer Beware!

In 2012, I purchased a KingSpec 128GB IDE (PATA) SSD. The retailer was Link-Delight-Oz, a seller on Ebay. It took about two weeks to arrive (from China to Australia). This drive was used to upgrade an older IBM ThinkPad notebook computer.

Using Ghost to copy the partitions from the mechanical drive to the KingSpec SSD was problem free. As soon as the SSD was installed in the ThinkPad, everything was fast. Windows XP took only 15 seconds to fully boot to the desktop. The improved speed breathed a new lease of life into the ThinkPad.

Slow Downs and eventual failure

Unfortunately, after 2 to 3 months, the drive started to slow down. There were unexpected pauses during periods of high disk I/O. Write speeds started to decline rapidly. Strangely enough, read speeds were still very good, and remained so.

One morning, my ThinkPad took much longer than usual to boot. I was then greeted by a frozen Windows desktop, with the hard disk activity light constantly lit. Eventually, windows blue-screened. After resetting, the Windows wouldn't boot anymore, always halting at a blue screen (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE). The Kingspec was half dead; it would refuse to be written to.

Data Recovery

Fortunately, I had a recent backup of my data. I still wanted to retrieve my more recent files, so I decided to perform data recovery.

My initial attempt was to install the SSD into an IDE-USB caddy. I duly plugged the caddy into another computer, and Windows went ahead and installed the new USB drive. Unfortunately, that was as far as it got. From this point on, the Event Log started filling up with errors like: "The driver detected a controller error on DeviceHarddisk1D."

I figured that in order for windows to mount a drive, it would need to be able to write to it. The mounting failed because the Kingspec SSD controller kept returning errors whenever data was to be written or modified. So, another method was needed.

My second attempt was to mount it read-only in Linux. This time, the only hurdle was to 'force mount' the NTFS partition - it was not cleanly unmounted by windows (during the ill-fated boot).

After it was mounted as read-only, I was able to copy everything off the Kingspec SSD to a spare disk.

Warranty - privacy concerns

Being unable to delete, format or otherwise wipe my data from the SSD meant that I could not send it back under warranty because the drive contained sensitive files. I would not be comfortable sending a drive full of private data back to the manufacturer, even more so to one in China.

Buyer Beware!

I would recommend Kingston, OCZ, Intel, Samsung. Kingspec SSDs are unreliable. The price may be cheap, but you get what you pay for - Cheap 'n' Nasty!

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