Hello!
I manage a fleet of laptops and tablets for our company. As part of their upkeep, we routinely wipe the HDD/SDD and repartition it to install new operating systems via a scripted process. This is done in Windows PE using PowerShell scripts; we don't use Ghost or other cloning products.
I've been doing it the same way for a few years now, yet recently I've had a disturbing problem -- only with the SSD machines, not the ones still using HDDs.
The issue: After some number of repetitions of this process (we do this quarterly, so the number isn't high; maybe 10-20 times), I wipe the drive and repartition, then format the partitions. Typically the SSD will have a small partition of about 2 GB, with the rest allocated to a Windows OS. The small partition formats properly, but then the large one does not -- it may appear to be running but never complete, or it may freeze the whole system after a few minutes.
Details I've gathered over time:
One thing I tried is to pull the drive, which is normally installed as the boot drive, and put it in a caddy, then install that into another machine as a secondary drive. Doing that allowed me to wipe it and repartition by hand. However, this is obviously not an option for the Surface Pro 3, as I cannot remove those drives.
Checking SMART info shows me no obvious red flags; for instance, Intel's Toolbox gave the drives a 100% good status.
I'm starting to think that SSDs have some kind of hard limit on the number of times they can be wiped and repartitioned, whereas I've seen no such problem with our HDD-based machines. I'm very concerned that eventually this will render all of our SSD-based machines unusable, which would have a huge impact on our business.
Has anyone faced this problem before? Is there some built-in feature or limitation that I'm running up against?
Thank you for any assistance.
I manage a fleet of laptops and tablets for our company. As part of their upkeep, we routinely wipe the HDD/SDD and repartition it to install new operating systems via a scripted process. This is done in Windows PE using PowerShell scripts; we don't use Ghost or other cloning products.
I've been doing it the same way for a few years now, yet recently I've had a disturbing problem -- only with the SSD machines, not the ones still using HDDs.
The issue: After some number of repetitions of this process (we do this quarterly, so the number isn't high; maybe 10-20 times), I wipe the drive and repartition, then format the partitions. Typically the SSD will have a small partition of about 2 GB, with the rest allocated to a Windows OS. The small partition formats properly, but then the large one does not -- it may appear to be running but never complete, or it may freeze the whole system after a few minutes.
Details I've gathered over time:
- ■ Not SSD vendor specific -- this has happened with Intel drives but also with whatever's in the Surface Pro 3.
■ Not machine specific -- it's happened with Lenovo machines and with Surface Pro 3.
■ GPT or MBR, makes no difference.
■ UEFI or BIOS, makes no difference.
■ PowerShell, DiskPart, or cmd.exe "format," also makes no difference.
One thing I tried is to pull the drive, which is normally installed as the boot drive, and put it in a caddy, then install that into another machine as a secondary drive. Doing that allowed me to wipe it and repartition by hand. However, this is obviously not an option for the Surface Pro 3, as I cannot remove those drives.
Checking SMART info shows me no obvious red flags; for instance, Intel's Toolbox gave the drives a 100% good status.
I'm starting to think that SSDs have some kind of hard limit on the number of times they can be wiped and repartitioned, whereas I've seen no such problem with our HDD-based machines. I'm very concerned that eventually this will render all of our SSD-based machines unusable, which would have a huge impact on our business.
Has anyone faced this problem before? Is there some built-in feature or limitation that I'm running up against?
Thank you for any assistance.