Tragic images showing 50 mangled M.2 SSDs have been shared on social media. Sticks of speedy NVMe flash storage, like these Samsung PM991a models, are currently in high demand. However, it would be a hard sell to shift these particular samples, with their newfound non-factory-standard banana-curved profiles. The culprit? A ten-year-old boy, oblivious to the world's global NAND crisis, according to 'the most miserable dad in the world.'
Vietnamese ‘Build a PC is easy’ Facebook post, machine translation:
“The most miserable dad in the world.
Right when RAM, graphics cards, SSDs, CPUs… are all going up in price—rising even faster than gold— the son decides to ‘test durability’ and snaps an entire box of his dad’s SSDs.
NVMe SSD 512GB – about 2 million VND each × 50 units.
Honestly, scolding him feels too mild for this.”
Our machine translation of the original Vietnamese post on the ‘Build a PC is easy’ group on Facebook (h/t r/PCMR) seems to suggest that just one young boy was responsible for the NAND storage carnage you see laid out in our main photo.
The images appear to show that a whole case of Samsung M.2 NVMe drives has been damaged. According to the Vietnamese source post, the value of each unit is approx $76 at today’s exchange rates. Multiply that by 50, and you have $3,800.
Closer inspection of the photos reveals that the drives all appear to be Samsung PM991a models with 512GB of capacity, in the M.2 2280 form factor. These are OEM drives which aren’t readily purchasable from the big name etailers in the U.S. Thus, we scoured eBay for samples and saw they could be grabbed for $60, sold as new, from various resellers. That would reduce the total damage to $3,000 if all the bent drives were just scrapped and possessed no monetary value.
Will some of these bent M.2 2280 drives still be functional?
We’d love to see a follow-up of the original post with the Vietnamese computer shop testing these bent/broken drives one by one in an external caddy.
With the electronics in these Samsung PM991a 2280 form factor drives all concentrated to one side, they look a lot like the PM991 2230 or 2242 models we have seen ‘strapped to a plank.’
There’s therefore a chance that some of the broken devices have survived with no ruptures to the populated PCB segment, and no physical breaks to underlying PCB traces (if they are present/used) in the extended section of these 2280 form factor drives.
If the bent drives can't be reused or easily repaired, we hope the NAND chips can be recycled.
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