Can I detach my Samsung SSD 840 Pro without losing any sensitive data?
2014-07
Questioner
I have Samsung SSD 840 Pro installed and running in my desktop computer. I have important data on this drive.
Can I remove the drive from my computer (detach it from all the cables) without loosing any sensitive data on the drive? If yes, how long can the drive be removed from the computer before it starts losing data?
Gene
If you properly power down your system and unplug the SSD, the data stored in the flash cells will remain there for several years, according to Wikipedia.
martixy
Your drive is non-volatile storage. Meaning anything that is present on the drive will remain there for at least a few years. It is a hard drive after all, intended to store information without the need to constant power.
One note I'd like to add to all the others regarding disconnecting it while powered is - in Windows you can make the drive work like a very large thumb drive and eliminate most forms of data corruption stemming from a sudden disconnect. The difference is in a single policy change - whether you have write caching enabled on the device in question, which for your generic thumb drives defaults to off, allowing quick removal, while for larger devices defaults to on, on the assumption they'll be a more permanent part of the system.
The setting can be found in the device's properties(from the device manager) under the "Policies" tab.
If you pull the drive, it will close all open handles to any files on the drive - potentially corrupting them. There is also a good possibility that windows will crash as it doesn't handle hard drives the same as removable drives... so you might as well shut it down properly!
That said, if you have removed the drive - there is a good chance it will still work apart from the few possibly corrupt files as SATA is a hot swappable technology, but again - why take that riaks with data?
The only acception to this is the system disk - which if removed, would kill the machine and possibly wreck the drive immediately.
Ram Rachum
I bought an SSD and I want to have my partitions aligned to 2048KB for better performance. I'm wondering, is it possible to realign the partitions without losing data? Is there some program that does this?
harrymc
The following are good and free partition managers.
However, it's unknown whether they will see your SSD, so you'll need to try:
EASEUS Partition Master (Home Edition)
Partition Manager 10 Express
Parted Magic
tvanover
The problem with what you are trying is that the partitions both need to begin and end on a multiple of 2048kb, which is easy with any partition tool (partition magic, or gparted) and the allocation unit size, which is set when the partition is formatted, while their is data in place.
So pretty much no. To align the partition you can do without reformatting, but to reset the allocation unit size you need to reformat.
Beaner
I've done this several times with GParted on regular hard drives. The warnings were always defrag first (I honestly don't know if you can do that), then best of luck and no guarantees. I never had a problem, but I was always aware I might. If you have data you want to keep it's best to just make a backup, try repartitioning, then you can test to see if your data is intact. If not you have a backup to begin rebuilding with.
Ram Rachum
It seems the answer is simply NO.