Four years ago, I replaced the system drive in my ageing (April 2010!) Windows 7 system with a Crucial SSD to give it a bit of a speed boost. It was a fast system for its day (quad-core i7 CPU) and installing the SSD meant I could put off upgrading for while.
It worked well and the system (now running Windows 10) still provides adequate performance for my needs. When I came downstairs this morning, however, it appeared to have rebooted itself overnight – Windows updates, I guess – but had failed to boot. A quick investigation revealed that the SSD was not recognised by the system.
Alarming as this was, it wasn’t too worrying as this had happened to me once before (when it was running Windows 7) and had been relatively simple to fix. In fact, I fixed it inadvertently by hooking the drive up to my laptop using a USB-SATA adapter to see if the drive could be examined that way. It turns out that doing just this and leaving the drive attached for a few minutes is the fix recommended by Crucial.
A bit of a nuisance when it happens but, fortunately, it only takes a few minutes to sort out. At twice in four years, I can live with it. What’s really remarkable is how I’m still happy running a computer that’s 10 years old – gone are the days when I felt compelled to upgrade every 18 months or so.