Aren't Macs of that era known for having BGA soldering issues? I suspect if there is any cause-effect relation going on here, it's that simply disturbing an old system internally and putting some mechanical stress on the board (plugging/unplugging cables) is causing cracks in already weak solder joints that results in a failure after some number of thermal cycles. There is no reason that a faster disk would make the motherboard fail.
Yes, you're right. iMacs from the early 2010s are known for week soldering.
I guess I'm just trying to investigate a link with SSD installation and precipitated failure.
The only thing I have noticed retrofitting new SSDs to old systems is old Marvel SATA2 controllers generating link errors with new SSDs causing very puzzling system failures until the SSD is moved to a different controller.
The only thing I have noticed retrofitting new SSDs to old systems is old Marvel SATA2 controllers generating link errors with new SSDs causing very puzzling system failures until the SSD is moved to a different controller.
thanks David.
Can you give an example of a puzzling failure?
And when you say move to a different controller do you mean physically or virtually?
-I can tell my experience. I have put SSD (mostly fast Samsung 860 Evo, but there were a bit older 840-850 Pro models and 1-2 non-Samsung too) into up to 10 old PCs (and laptops), and only one MB died (it worked several years with several SSDs until death).
Here's a thought. Were these systems in use right up to the time of upgrade or have they been taken out of service some time back, left in a closet and now you are resurrecting them?
There was a study that tried to show the relationship between drinking alcohol and health. It concluded that a few alcoholic drinks per day promoted better health than none or too many. Later the study methodology was reviewed. Turns out that in the original study it was hard to find people who didn’t drink alcohol so all the people in that group were former alcoholics.
There was a study that tried to show the relationship between drinking alcohol and health. It concluded that a few alcoholic drinks per day promoted better health than none or too many. Later the study methodology was reviewed. Turns out that in the original study it was hard to find people who didn’t drink alcohol so all the people in that group were former alcoholics.
Seems like that wouldn't be all that hard. IIRC both Mormons and Muslims typically do not drink alcohol, neither is particularly hard to come by on a global scale.
ESD failures are not always immediate. Often far from it.
How many machines of this age do you not open and upgrade, and then monitor for the next year?
And a third group would also shed light: machines of the same age disassembled to the same degree needed for an SSD swap, except simply reassembled using the original components.
My hypothesis: It's as if the system was used to operating at a slow speed all it's life. With an SSD the electronic components get a shock, can no longer handle the speed and the motherboard fails because of overstress.
Sorry for being over simplistic here. But does anybody have any theories on why this happens?
(But please don't state the bleeding obvious by saying "they're old systems anyway")
Yeah, no.
Since this is not a widespread problem (I follow the Mac world closely), it’s most likely you are causing the damage somehow. ESD damage is the most likely, but could also be things like incorrect (dis)assembly, for example stressing boards incorrectly, causing damage to solder joints.
Get a DC current clamp, splice into the power suppply cable......note dc current in when with HDD and then with SSD.
Compare.
Its likely its using too much power with ssd
Rubbish, treez. The average power consumption of an SSD is massively lower than an HDD.
treez? 
What gives? treez = ocset?
Pop treez in a members search and hunt through a few of his posts looking for quoted ones.
Good spotting by Monkeh.
The only thing I have noticed retrofitting new SSDs to old systems is old Marvel SATA2 controllers generating link errors with new SSDs causing very puzzling system failures until the SSD is moved to a different controller.
thanks David.
Can you give an example of a puzzling failure?
And when you say move to a different controller do you mean physically or virtually?
I physically moved the SSD from the motherboard's SATA2 Marvel controller to the JMicron controller, but I think the Intel controller would have worked just as well. The same SSDs have had no issues on new SATA2 systems.
The problem took more than a year to resolve. The symptom was simply black screen computer crashes, which were eventually daily, with no diagnostic information coming from Windows, but it finally generated a blue screen which mentioned something about the page file. Further investigation showed that the SSD was accumulating UDMA errors which is an interface problem. What was going on is that page-in operations were failing not with corrupted data but unavailable data, which obviously causes the operating system to become extremely unhappy. Each crash took time to manifest because paging operations increase as the memory load increases over time.
The above was not the only thing I changed to attempt to fix the problem. Originally I thought the crash was caused by hyperthreading because the original blue screen error had to do with interprocessor communications and disabling HT stopped the crashes for months. Now however I have been able to enable HT and have not had a single problem since moving the SSD.
I agree that the ESD concern is possible.
Another concern is simply "schrodinger's pc" -- if you just leave it on (or maybe cycle it daily) but don't move it, don't really touch it, don't open it, don't pull cables, flip it over, etc. etc. as you'd do to upgrade a drive to SSD, it's mechanically and electrically in a "relaxed" stable state. Physically disturb that and then you're taking the risk that the vibration / shock / stress of just mechanically working with it has maybe done something like cracked solder joints / vias / capacitors, caused capacitors to move / start leaking, etc.
And SSDs absolutely can put a higher thermal stress on the system than mechanical hard drives. Mechanical drives may have a high transient and steady power consumption but a slow data transfer rate and the thermal heat is spread over a larger volume which usually has some heatsinking due to the mounting bay.
Good SSDs, though, like the little NVME ones run so hot under load they need heatpads / heatsinks right on them unless they overheat and thermally throttle etc.
Then the much higher PCIE transfer rate can cause the motherboard chipset or CPU to run quite a bit hotter due to the fast PCIE SSD traffic -- same for faster PCIE GPUs.
Newer / better PCIE4 motherboards have cooling fans right on the chipset chip largely due to the PCIE based heat from NVME drives, GPUs, etc.
Depends on your I/O profile but it could be significant in cases where good advantage is taken of the SSD's better bandwidth.
Some systems could fail simply by a ball of dust or a loose screw / whatever moving around from place to place when the system moves and unfortunately blocking something in a worse way than it was doing before.
Thank you for the brilliant and concise set of possibilities.
There was a study that tried to show the relationship between drinking alcohol and health. It concluded that a few alcoholic drinks per day promoted better health than none or too many. Later the study methodology was reviewed. Turns out that in the original study it was hard to find people who didn’t drink alcohol so all the people in that group were former alcoholics.
Seems like that wouldn't be all that hard. IIRC both Mormons and Muslims typically do not drink alcohol, neither is particularly hard to come by on a global scale.
I think the point is that some studies and experiments are set up more rigorously than others and the quality of the undertaking might be reflected in the conclusion.
Kinda like this:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/ssd-disks-seem-to-accelerate-motherboard-failure-on-computers/msg3586921/#msg3586921Could be how the data was collected an/or how it was analyzed; sometimes the conclusion just isn't correct.
The problem with all academic research into alcohol, other recreational drugs, and all the other things that tend to attract a 'moral' response from a significant number of people, is that it tends to reflect the views, whether they be pro- or anti-, of the researchers or their funders. Treat any research in any of these areas with utmost scepticism. When people do good, unbiased research in these fields and produce valid results that other people don't like it can go badly for them - see what happened to Professor David Nutt, a former government drugs adviser who was sacked when is research findings didn't support the government's position.
There was a study that tried to show the relationship between drinking alcohol and health. It concluded that a few alcoholic drinks per day promoted better health than none or too many. Later the study methodology was reviewed. Turns out that in the original study it was hard to find people who didn’t drink alcohol so all the people in that group were former alcoholics.
This appears to be a garbled recollection of this study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01286.x
Background: Growing epidemiological evidence indicates that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with reduced total mortality among middle-aged and older adults. However, the salutary effect of moderate drinking may be overestimated owing to confounding factors. Abstainers may include former problem drinkers with existing health problems and may be atypical compared to drinkers in terms of sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between alcohol consumption and all-cause mortality over 20 years among 1,824 older adults, controlling for a wide range of potential confounding factors associated with abstention.
Methods: The sample at baseline included 1,824 individuals between the ages of 55 and 65. The database at baseline included information on daily alcohol consumption, sociodemographic factors, former problem drinking status, health factors, and social-behavioral factors. Abstention was defined as abstaining from alcohol at baseline. Death across a 20-year follow-up period was confirmed primarily by death certificate.
Results: Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting for all covariates, abstainers and heavy drinkers continued to show increased mortality risks of 51 and 45%, respectively, compared to moderate drinkers.
Conclusions: Findings are consistent with an interpretation that the survival effect for moderate drinking compared to abstention among older adults reflects 2 processes. First, the effect of confounding factors associated with alcohol abstention is considerable. However, even after taking account of traditional and nontraditional covariates, moderate alcohol consumption continued to show a beneficial effect in predicting mortality risk.
Of course there have been many other studies which support or refute the conclusions 
This one in particular got a lot of press: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.10.21256931v1
Conclusions No safe dose of alcohol for the brain was found. Moderate consumption is associated with more widespread adverse effects on the brain than previously recognised. Individuals who binge drink or with high blood pressure and BMI may be more susceptible. Detrimental effects of drinking appear to be greater than other modifiable factors. Current ‘low risk’ drinking guidelines should be revisited to take account of brain effects.
Cheers!
"abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk."
"Abstainers may include former problem drinkers with existing health problems and may be atypical compared to drinkers in terms of sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors."uh, which part was garbled?
I agree that the ESD concern is possible.
Another concern is simply "schrodinger's pc" -- if you just leave it on (or maybe cycle it daily) but don't move it, don't really touch it, don't open it, don't pull cables, flip it over, etc. etc. as you'd do to upgrade a drive to SSD, it's mechanically and electrically in a "relaxed" stable state. Physically disturb that and then you're taking the risk that the vibration / shock / stress of just mechanically working with it has maybe done something like cracked solder joints / vias / capacitors, caused capacitors to move / start leaking, etc.
And SSDs absolutely can put a higher thermal stress on the system than mechanical hard drives. Mechanical drives may have a high transient and steady power consumption but a slow data transfer rate and the thermal heat is spread over a larger volume which usually has some heatsinking due to the mounting bay.
Good SSDs, though, like the little NVME ones run so hot under load they need heatpads / heatsinks right on them unless they overheat and thermally throttle etc.
Then the much higher PCIE transfer rate can cause the motherboard chipset or CPU to run quite a bit hotter due to the fast PCIE SSD traffic -- same for faster PCIE GPUs.
Newer / better PCIE4 motherboards have cooling fans right on the chipset chip largely due to the PCIE based heat from NVME drives, GPUs, etc.
Depends on your I/O profile but it could be significant in cases where good advantage is taken of the SSD's better bandwidth.
Some systems could fail simply by a ball of dust or a loose screw / whatever moving around from place to place when the system moves and unfortunately blocking something in a worse way than it was doing before.
The load a NVME (or any SSD) is going to put on the PCIE bus is nothing compared to a 16x Graphics Card. The graphics card is constantly transfeting it's max data rate when you're gaming. The SSD works in short bursts. PCIE v1x16 graphics cards transfer 8GB/s. No SSD is there yet. They need 1/4 the bandwidth (4 lanes)
Motherboards don't fail from "hard use". In general motherboards rarely fail, a 30% failure rate on motherboards that are 5-10 years old is astonishing, and pretty much an indication that you are damaging them.
There are a few options but my money is on overheating. This could happen a couple ways. You could unplug a case fan either accidentally or deliberately and forget to plug it back in. If you try to clean the years of accumulated dust out of the case you could be actually damaging a fan causing it to fail within a few weeks and overheat. Blowing around dust with compressed air can drive more dust into a bearing. Or you could rearrange things in a way that that obstructs airflow. When you get a failure look to see if any fans are stopped, too slow, or show abnormal friction when off.
It could also easily be mechanical damage or ESD. Or it could be something else entirely. Since you haven't given details of the symptoms it could even be that the motherboard is fine, something other hardware or software is the problem.
The graphics card is constantly transfeting it's max data rate when you're gaming.
Utter rubbish. What do you think it has RAM on it for?
E: Oh, and SSDs are there. They've been there for several years. You've just got no way to use them with toy desktops.
I had a recent crypto mining adventure that used of SSDs and ran them flat out for days moving about 30 TB of data in a day.
SSDs can consume a considerable amount of power indeed, but its still less than a HDD. An actively working SSD does consume more than a idle HDD (laptop drives typically reduce RPM when under low utilization), but when a HDD is actively working it consumes more power than a actively working SSD. Still these powers are in the order of a few watts, so its not going to really break anything.
What i have noticed however is that hammering a bunch of SATA SSDs full on did make the southbridge run noticeably more toasty (This is where the SATA comes from) so i added a fan to help cool it.
Modern SSDs can indeed saturate a PCIe link because they typically only use up to a PCIe 4x link. Yes GPUs can transfer even more data since they have a PCIe x16 link while they indeed don't usually make use of all of it, the trick to making the GPU hog all of it is to let it run out of VRAM, this will make it start swapping into main RAM and clog that x16 link. But this is unlikely to make something overheat, if anything a big GPU itself would cook things to death before the PCIe power use would, the PCIe lines go straight to the CPU anyway. However... there are also chipsets out there that provide extra PCIe lanes from the southbridge chip, these are typically used for any extra onboard peripherals such as perhaps a fancy high performance network interface, WiFi, extra SATA controllers, and M.2 slots. So in this way a M.2 NVME SSD could put extra thermal load into the southbridge chip.
An SSD will also rise the peak CPU utilization since during boot the OS is spending much less time waiting for data to arrive from disk and much more time actually processing the data it just read. But a laptop should not die just because the CPU utilization hits 100% every so often. That's like a cars engine breaking down if you floor the gas pedal for a little bit too many times. But yeah holding 100% CPU utilization on a laptop tends to not be good for them since they typically don't have enough cooling to handle it unless you live in Antarctica. But this is not something a SSD would do.
I don't really think this is the cause of the machines giving up the ghost. Its likely just that they die from old age. All the machines you happened to upgrade ware likely machines that got used a lot (hence why they ended up upgraded) and they just slowly died on there own. A lot of apple laptop models are famous to just die after a certain number of years due to the soldering giving up.
I've done a couple hundred upgrades from mechanical to SSD in the PC environment (including a bunch of them the time I worked in Limerick
), both in desktops and laptops, and I can confirm that hasn't happened to me either.
Motherboards and any series of computer components, on the other hand, can develop a typical problem affecting models or batch of units as a whole over time, where a pattern of failures starts to show. As a wise guy mentions before there could be a correlation and not causality.
Motherboards don't fail from "hard use". In general motherboards rarely fail, a 30% failure rate on motherboards that are 5-10 years old is astonishing, and pretty much an indication that you are damaging them.
Over the past 30+ years I have had extended personal experience with ... at least 20 motherboards, and the only ones that failed without reason had nVidia nForce2 chipsets; those three, all being different makes and models purchased at about the same time, were 100% at about 5 years. The only other failures were motherboards with embedded lithium backup batteries which ran dead.
So the problem is only with a limited model types of MAC.
Could it be the material SSDs chassis are made with cause more stress from thermal expansion or the change of weight changes how the motherboard vibrates and it's mechanical harmonics. Could be just a particular connector getting lose from vibrations and shorting the whole thing to death.
It is well known fact that Macbook solder is known to crack. But 3-4 months with 30% failure rate is surprising. I've never seen such high failure rates even with shittiest of any computer shop.
What failure mode BTW.
It is well known fact that Macbook solder is known to crack.
What utter tosh! If that is true, prey tell us exactly what is special about "Macbook solder" that makes it so fragile and how a quality obsessed company like Apple would continue to use it after it became a "well known fact"?
It is well known fact that Macbook solder is known to crack.
What utter tosh! If that is true, prey tell us exactly what is special about "Macbook solder" that makes it so fragile and how a quality obsessed company like Apple would continue to use it after it became a "well known fact"?
well, work hardening?
Also, there's a long list of defects in their products that they know, exists but don't bother fixing it. Like butterfly keyboard and touch bars that die easily
What utter tosh! If that is true, prey tell us exactly what is special about "Macbook solder" that makes it so fragile and how a quality obsessed company like Apple would continue to use it after it became a "well known fact"?
I can't answer either of the technical questions, but there was a class-action lawsuit and a recall of Macbooks for this very issue.