Failed SSD on Acer Aspire One ZG5
Yesterday i received one of those which would no longer boot into XP. First thought: "Not again...". 2 years ago i had to deal with one that had its SSD ribbon ripped off complete with the connector on the motherboard, and i had to make it work off a USB drive, with a SDHC card for storage. Fun...
I used WinToFlash to make a bootable XP USB flash drive, but as i tried to install it it hung at the start of graphical mode setup. Next time around, when i attempted to format the drive, the netbook froze. It did the same with any utility i tried. After a few more tries i got it formatted, but it hung again, and again and again... It also seemed very slow at copying stuff.
RAM tested okay, so the only point of failure could have been the 8GB SSD drive. I happened to have a 30GB 1.8" Samsung Spinpoint hard drive lying around, which has the same type of connector as the SSD. Well... almost. The connector on the Samsung HDD was designed for a thin flex cable, as it came from a USB HDD with a controller failure, the flex was bent from the factory and it eventually broke, beyond repair.
So i had to carefully pry off the plastic tab at the drive end of the ribbon connecting the drive to the mobo, because it was too thick for the connector, and replace it with a piece of electrical tape which fit just fine. I managed to do this without breaking the ribbon.
Then a bit of the foamy stuff they package motherboards in gave a nice confy space for the HDD to live in. The ribbon also went thru a fairly chunky bit of ferrite on the board end, i had to remove that as the 1.8" HDD is a bit taller than the SSD and the top casing wouldn't fit. I don't think it was really required anyway as the ribbon is short. Anyway, long story short, the drive fired up and was detected just fine.
Windows XP installed fine from the USB drive to the 30GB HDD, and now the netbook is fully working again. This model is notorious for its BIOS failures, where it would fail to POST because the BIOS gets corrupted. The recovery procedure can be found here if anyone needs it. Guess we can add SSD failure to the list of known issues.
I found the datasheet of the flash chips used in the SSD and it's no big surprise that they wore out - this is the kind of cheap flash used in "MP4" players and ipod knockoffs, and it fails at a steady rate in those players, with the most common symptoms being lost songs or corrupted firmware (the infamous "hourglass on a blue background" on Actions chipsets). This stuff has no place in a drive that is used for a computer OS. It's also pretty slow - to be honest, the 1.8" 3600rpm Samsung HDD that barely reaches 20MB/s installed Windows faster than the SSD did (at least as far as it got).
I don't know what Acer was trying to do (besides catching up with Asus and their Eee PC). What i do know is what they did is, to be honest, a pile of turd. Sure, it is small and light, but it's slow as a hog, it's plagued by many reliability issues, the speakers are on the bottom, and the battery barely gets 2 hours which negates the portability advantage.
Oh, and the icing on the cake is this: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/26/8...flaw-distaste/
Indeed, cranking up the tunes results in the HDD activity light going on solid and the thing BSODing after a minute or so if the volume isn't turned back down. Now i have to take it apart again and add some shielding to the speaker. Vibration is definitely not the issue here as i detailed the mounting of the HDD above, but the electromagnetic field radiated from the right speaker when it is playing loud. Heap o' sh*t. I hope i never see one again else it'll be going straight to the 
.
I used WinToFlash to make a bootable XP USB flash drive, but as i tried to install it it hung at the start of graphical mode setup. Next time around, when i attempted to format the drive, the netbook froze. It did the same with any utility i tried. After a few more tries i got it formatted, but it hung again, and again and again... It also seemed very slow at copying stuff.
RAM tested okay, so the only point of failure could have been the 8GB SSD drive. I happened to have a 30GB 1.8" Samsung Spinpoint hard drive lying around, which has the same type of connector as the SSD. Well... almost. The connector on the Samsung HDD was designed for a thin flex cable, as it came from a USB HDD with a controller failure, the flex was bent from the factory and it eventually broke, beyond repair.
So i had to carefully pry off the plastic tab at the drive end of the ribbon connecting the drive to the mobo, because it was too thick for the connector, and replace it with a piece of electrical tape which fit just fine. I managed to do this without breaking the ribbon.
Then a bit of the foamy stuff they package motherboards in gave a nice confy space for the HDD to live in. The ribbon also went thru a fairly chunky bit of ferrite on the board end, i had to remove that as the 1.8" HDD is a bit taller than the SSD and the top casing wouldn't fit. I don't think it was really required anyway as the ribbon is short. Anyway, long story short, the drive fired up and was detected just fine.Windows XP installed fine from the USB drive to the 30GB HDD, and now the netbook is fully working again. This model is notorious for its BIOS failures, where it would fail to POST because the BIOS gets corrupted. The recovery procedure can be found here if anyone needs it. Guess we can add SSD failure to the list of known issues.
I found the datasheet of the flash chips used in the SSD and it's no big surprise that they wore out - this is the kind of cheap flash used in "MP4" players and ipod knockoffs, and it fails at a steady rate in those players, with the most common symptoms being lost songs or corrupted firmware (the infamous "hourglass on a blue background" on Actions chipsets). This stuff has no place in a drive that is used for a computer OS. It's also pretty slow - to be honest, the 1.8" 3600rpm Samsung HDD that barely reaches 20MB/s installed Windows faster than the SSD did (at least as far as it got).
I don't know what Acer was trying to do (besides catching up with Asus and their Eee PC). What i do know is what they did is, to be honest, a pile of turd. Sure, it is small and light, but it's slow as a hog, it's plagued by many reliability issues, the speakers are on the bottom, and the battery barely gets 2 hours which negates the portability advantage.
Oh, and the icing on the cake is this: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/26/8...flaw-distaste/
Indeed, cranking up the tunes results in the HDD activity light going on solid and the thing BSODing after a minute or so if the volume isn't turned back down. Now i have to take it apart again and add some shielding to the speaker. Vibration is definitely not the issue here as i detailed the mounting of the HDD above, but the electromagnetic field radiated from the right speaker when it is playing loud. Heap o' sh*t. I hope i never see one again else it'll be going straight to the .
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