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Today I took apart my computer which housed two SSDs working as separate drives. Now I don't really need them in another computer and since they still have tons of life left, I want to use them as backup drives. First thing that came to my mind is simply using them with a SATA to USB connector. I tried that, and the drives are recognized by the computer (I can view SMART data etc.), but every time I unplug them from the USB, the SMART data records an unexpected power loss. So this raises a few questions:

  1. Can these power losses damage the drive or lower its endurance?

  2. If I copy data to the drive via the USB connector, will the data certainly be flushed to the NAND flash, instead of staying in the DRAM cache and eventually disappearing due to the sudden power loss? If not, is there a way to shut down the drive properly, while still using the USB connector?

Apart from the idea of using a SATA to USB connector, I thought that I could simply put the drives into an old laptop from time to time, run robocopy in Windows PE and just copy data from an external HDD (also SATA to USB) to the SSD in the laptop. Is that possible?

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  • Pleas only ask one question at a time. Commented Jan 3, 2015 at 18:22

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  1. Yes, make sure that if you are using Windows, you have set the policy to Quick removal.

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In addition, before removing, always safely eject the device from the icon in the bottom right... If your drive has multiple partitions, right clicking and choosing eject is not always good enough.

  1. That is down to the individual SSD and no one can say without having the schematics for your individual drive. As stated above, set it to quick removal and always safely remove the hardware.

  2. For your last part, yes that is possible... You don't even need Windows PE, you can just use it as a standard backup machine as often as you like.

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  • I tried the method with quick removal earlier and it still added an unexpected power loss. It seems that it stops writing data to the drive, but still powers it. Regarding the last part, by standard backup machine you mean a laptop with an OS? Commented Jan 3, 2015 at 18:57
  • Yep, standard laptop. And going back to quick removal... Did you also do safely remove? Just because it is optimised for quick removal doesn't mean that you shouldn't do safely remove... I have seen data go corrupt far too many times from people not safely removing! Commented Jan 3, 2015 at 19:23
  • I did use safely remove. Commented Jan 3, 2015 at 19:25

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