Cheapie pre-build not recognising hard drive after 3 weeks?

[jmsgld]

Needed a cheap machine in a hurry, bought this 3 weeks ago ; https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers-for-next-day-delivery/1874/

Delivered within 24h which was impressive.

All fine until today when I left it for an hour and returned to find BIOS screen, no longer recognising hard drive, hence won't boot windows.

It's a PCS branded SSD, is it likely to have failed? Visual inspection all ok.

Is this build flawed / bin ends?

I have resurrected an old machine which will do for now.

It's only used for word , Excel, emails etc. and some photoshop., didn't think I needed to spend much. Should I have this repaired or spec something with a branded SSD. I hadn't got around to setting a back up just yet, so will have to manually input 3 weeks worth of data into Excel which is a royal PITA. Unless PCS can recover / mirror.

It was £550, wouldn't want to spend more than £750

Any thoughts? Thanks

 

[steaky360]

Have you contact PCS for RMA/replacement drive(s) etc. (in the event of failure). Regardless of the price of the machine you shouldn't be put out for any failed hardware.

If the drive hasn't failed there is a potential the data can be recovered.

 

[BlessedSquirrel]

Needed a cheap machine in a hurry, bought this 3 weeks ago ; https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers-for-next-day-delivery/1874/

Delivered within 24h which was impressive.

All fine until today when I left it for an hour and returned to find BIOS screen, no longer recognising hard drive, hence won't boot windows.

It's a PCS branded SSD, is it likely to have failed? Visual inspection all ok.

Is this build flawed / bin ends?

I have resurrected an old machine which will do for now.

It's only used for word , Excel, emails etc. and some photoshop., didn't think I needed to spend much. Should I have this repaired or spec something with a branded SSD. I hadn't got around to setting a back up just yet, so will have to manually input 3 weeks worth of data into Excel which is a royal PITA. Unless PCS can recover / mirror.

It was £550, wouldn't want to spend more than £750

Any thoughts? Thanks

It does sound like the SSD has failed from the symptoms.

BUT, worth physically removing the SSD and reinserting it, sometimes they can come loose in transit.

If that's still failed, raise it with PCS, they can send out a replacement next day delivery for you to fit and it's fully covered under warranty.

But for any critical data, you never want to store on an SSD for this exact reason, SSD's fail catastrophically, they work one second and are fully failed the next and can’t be recovered. HDD's fail sector by sector so you would normally have months of warning before any failure, so you have time to swap it out and copy off the data.

Those PCS drives are prone to failure, if you're able to, I would ask PCS if you can pay the extra to upgrade it to a branded drive (all but the Samsung 990 Pro which is also prone to failure), a P41 is a Gen 4 drive and may be the best value and very reliable.

 

[jmsgld]

Thanks, contacted PCS and they had me move the SSD to another slot which didn't make any difference, so looks like it's dead.

I asked for the a P41 instead of the PCS SSD as a replacement but they refused... was just arranging to send the whole machine back for a refund. Turns out the P41 512 is cheaper, seems bonkers that they would prefer to take back a 3 week used machine for a total refund and pay postage than to send out a cheaper SSD... Anyway, lesson learned about fragility of SSD and keeping on top of back ups... Thanks for the help