SSD problems

moonshieldmedia · Mar 4, 2014

If anyone is good with hard drives, here's my issue:

I rented out my Blackmagic cinema camera and SSDs to someone. When she came to pick up the camera I did a quick demo to show her everything was working fine. I told her I already formatted the drives using Disk Utility so they were ready for her to use.

She immediately went home, shot some test footage, then tried to reformat them again herself and somehow screwed everything up.

Now the drives won't mount on her iMac or my Macbook Pro. When I plug them in via USB to SATA wire cable, they make weird digital noises coming from the drives themselves. One of them literally does nothing when plugged in, the other one shows an error that it cannot be recognized.

When I put them into the camera, it just says "No SSD"

How can I reformat them or restore them if they aren't mounting?

Will Vincent · Mar 4, 2014

Can you see them in the OSX Disk Utility?

SSD's shouldn't make any noise though.. if you're positive the SSD is actually making noise, you may need to replace it.

moonshieldmedia · Mar 4, 2014

disk utility is listing the cable (made by Apricorn), but not the hard drive itself, which usually is listed in a sub category. Seems weird.

Will Vincent · Mar 4, 2014

Do you have access to a linux or windows machine? If so you might be able to blow away the partition and format as FAT so that it's mountable by your mac again, then kill that and reformat to HFS+

But it kind of sounds like your SSD is fried.. is it new enough to be within warranty? If so, rather than fussing with it, probably best to just RMA and get a replacement.

Sweetie · Mar 4, 2014

Will's right. From my limited knowledge of them, SSD's shouldn't make noise. They don't have moving parts like IDE/SATA Drives. It does sound like it's fried.

Will Vincent · Mar 4, 2014

It could be capacitor whine, but still.. an SSD shouldn't do that.

wheatgrinder · Mar 5, 2014

are the ssd for the camera in some kind of caddy? Maybe someone swapped your ssd for a fried HD?

Will Vincent · Mar 5, 2014

No Wheat, the black magic takes bare SSD drives, no caddy

moonshieldmedia · Mar 5, 2014

thanks for the help so far...

other people have reported an almost inaudible electrical hum on their SSDs, but mine is relatively loud. It's like a faint 56k modem. haha

the lady who borrowed my drives said one of them she tried to format herself, but the 2nd one all she did was plug it into her computer and something immediately went wrong. They were both working fine minutes before she plugged them in. They are less than a year old.

I will have to try using a friend's PC to see what we can do.

Will Vincent · Mar 5, 2014

Less than a year old, so you ought to be able to exchange them for new ones. You probably should.

wheatgrinder · Mar 5, 2014

^^^ do this even if you get them working again..

Will Vincent · Mar 5, 2014

Yes. even if they work, exchange for free while you can. SSDs have a finite (albeit large, but still limited) number of read/write cycles available to them.