Cavalry SSD Disappointing

15 months ago, I purchased an ultra small fanless Intel Atom based PC to test on a small PBX project. Silence and durability were the critical components of this project and I was going to use a CF card for the “disk” drive in this PC. The application required only read access for the OS and a small partition for logging and voicemail recordings. Low disk I/O access and utilization, to be sure. Not wanting to worry about write wear on the CF card or an additional drive just for logging, I decided to try out one of the “new fangled” Solid State Disk(SSD) drives. They were supposed to be super fast and, with no moving parts, much less prone to failure than a standard spinning disk drive. Silent operation and low heat were bonus features.

I spent a few dollars more than I should have on a Cavalry 32GB 2.5” SSD drive. At the time it seemed like a neat unit with built in SATA and USB 2.0 interfaces right on the drive. The unit has been in production since then and besides slight disappointment in the speed of the drive things have been working great and the project has worked out well.

This morning, voicemail stopped working. Checking the PC I found a disk error that I was unfamiliar with. I found lots of references to this error online where it was most often referred to as being transient and rebooting usually resolved the issue at least temporarily. But, when I rebooted, I got an error that was all too familiar; Operating System Not Found. Bah!

Further checking lead me to find that the drive wasn’t even being seen by the PC at the BiOS level so, I pulled the drive and put it into a known good PC to eliminate the possibility of a motherboard controller error. Nothing. No drive detected. It seems like it won’t even power on but, it’s impossible to say as there is no power indicator on the drive and being SSD there is no platter spin up noise as there is on normal drives. Regardless of whether it is the drive controller or a power issue inside the drive, it’s failed.

Drive failures are an unfortunate fact of life. I had really hoped that I would be less likely to see drive failure with an SSD but, it happens and I’m willing to accept it without too much frustration. So, I contact Cavalry regarding at least getting a warranty replacement. Contact it seems is only possible via their web interface as there doesn’t seem to be a phone number for Cavalry support anywhere. That’s when the penny drops. This drive is 15 months old and is therefore 3 months outside the one year warranty. Sorry. Have a nice day.

I’ll get another drive for the PBX but, I won’t be buying anymore Cavalry drives!

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