Renovate an old SSD drive

Some time ago, my friend gave me a second hand SSD, which come from his old laptop. The SSD was kept in good condition. However, the SSD was not being used for more than half year.

I plugged the SSD to my desktop as an additional drive. The BIOS was able to detect the SSD, but it didn't function normally. It took much longer time to boot into my Ubuntu Linux. In the dmesg log, it was showing a lot of IO errors:

Basically, the SSD was unstable and slow. At that time, I thought the SSD was broken.

Then, I tried to dig out more information about SSD on the Internet. According to the article The Truth About SSD Data Retention, SSD is not good for storing data offline for long period of time. The SSD was not being used for more than half year, the data in the SSD may be lost or corrupted. This could corrupt the file system and could screw up the controller of SSD. This may be the reason for the instability and slowness.

I was thinking it may fix the problem, if I wipe out all the data in the SSD. Some articles on the web mentioned that we can restore the SSD performance by secure erase. Then, I issued the secure erase commands suggested in the page to clean up the data in SSD. Luckily, the SSD was refreshed. Now, the SSD is working perfectly.

Key takeaways:

1. SSD is not good for offline data storing.
2. If your SSD is unstable or slow, secure erase may be the last resort to fix the problem.