The strange case of an OCZ Petrol SSD

Jan 30, 2016

Warning: This post was written 3248 days ago, and may contain incorrect information, outdated opinions, and incorrect language due to my age at the time. Opinions in this post are not representative of who I am as a person today.

A few years ago I took the risk and installed an SSD into my father’s PC, At the time his 300GB Seagate drive had failed in his stock Dell PC, just a touch outside of the warranty period, and in an attempt to keep the costs low I ended up picking a cheap SSD for him. The cheapest at the time was an OCZ Petrol 64GB. Only after a year or so did the horror stories (archive.org) about OCZ SSDs start appearing and a lot of people experienced failures after just a few weeks to months. My father’s SSD carried on chugging for a good few years, and died just a few weeks ago, not bad for a cursed brand…

The strange part was how it failed. Usually, these SSDs just stopped working in every way and would appear to the BIOS. In this instance it was still there, it still booted, and it got about halfway through the boot sequence for Windows XP before dying with IO errors BSOD. At the time I wrote off the disk as a complete failure, trying to plug it into another PC didn’t work, USB to SATA connector didn’t work, even when I did manage to get recognising on a system it said around 95% of the blocks were bad on the device. New SSD was purchased and this one was forgotten about on my desk until I picked up a new USB 3.0 to SATA cable (archive.org) from Amazon today.

On a whim I decided to plug it into the drive, then into my Mac. OSX by default doesn’t write to NTFS but can read it, and it turns out it identifies something very weird in this device. When operated in read-only mode with no writes attempted to the device it works perfectly, this also confirms what I was seeing in the PC in that the boot loader and initial stages of Windows XP worked fine, but when it came to checking the disk and do a write it caused the device to lock solid.

So, if you have an OCZ Petrol that you need to recover data from, try getting a device that supports write blocking and give it a go.