General discussion: What is killing boot SSDs?

Nice pics, thanks, and good thinking on thermal paste.

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Once you have stripped down to this state no point to no go the whole hog so to speak.

Do note that the process of getting the original SATA SSD cloned over to an NVMe disk is not for the average user - involved 2 different M.2 carrier units and 2 different OS’s utilities (maybe could have just used Ubuntu) but it was a exercise in possibility and due diligence on my part with the stories of so many Nucleus SSD’s calling it a day in one form or another. Plus the fact that mine was SATA not NVMe and from the looks of things an older drive manufactured date, plus my Nucleus is out of warranty.

My Nucleus is essentially a back up unit for my Win10 beefier machine but does now have the 128GB NVMe and 12GB of RAM instead of the original 4GB - but its still an i3 CPU so isn’t going to replace my W10 i7-7700 in performance where I have 270K tracks in the database.

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What drive shipped with the Nucleus and was that pink stuff the entirety of the heat sink for the drive?

It was an ADATA 64GB SATA M.2 drive Mfg Date 0608. And yes the pink stuff (2 layers) approx 30x15mm and maybe 4-5mm thick stacked to meet the SSD 2.5" plate for the original drive (its rather shorter) cooling. But in my installation of the NVMe 128GB 2280 length drive and the aluminium heat sink (also a aluminium plate on the bottom) the 2 old pink ones were a good solution to the top part tho I wonder if just an air gap would be similarly OK.

I don’t disagree. But due to the way the Nucleus is presented, the way it looks, and the way it is sold in Hi-Fi stores, I wonder how many people there are who don’t realize it can’t be treated like most other consumer devices.

What makes things worse, the power button is located behind the unit, so it can be hard to see if the Nucleus is on or not. Yes, I know it should be kept on all the time, but in a domestic setting this might not always be possible or even desired.

Probably too difficult to implement for a company the size of Roon Labs, I guess. But I think that there is a market for “an easy to use, turn-key solution with reliable and robust operation”, without having to worry about things like losing power. And it may seem to many that the Nucleus is in that category, and this could be causing dead drives.

I have the new fanless MacBook Air, and have to say it is an absolutely wonderful computer that makes the Nucleus, basically a big and very heavy heatsink, look like ancient technology. And I believe Apple silicon performance is adequate enough for running a Roon server. I don’t know much about other fanless laptops, are they performant enough and can they already run Roon software natively?

This sounds very scary. My Nucleus at least does not have an M.2 heatsink.

So I wonder if the majority of dead drives have been on a Nucleus? Making this a Nucleus specific problem?

Please identify the brand, model and capacity of the m.2 SSD you have.

Yes. SSD is especially prone to such a problem. In fact, the older SSD had firmware issues with sleep too, so they were best run in 7x24 environment and never powered off.

Yes, some of them do get really hot. I recall a hardware review website published a measurement of over 110 degrees Celsius several years ago.

No, this is not a Nucleus specific problem.

I reiterate my position that people should buy only from a SSD manufacturer who manufactures its own NAND chips.

Do not buy QLC, especially not for boot drive - even though everyone else thinks QLC is a good idea for read-only music data.

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Transcend TS128GMTE110S, manufacture date 10 2019.

I ordered a new Transcend drive with the same product code and noticed it had a different number of chips (4 instead of 2).

I would have gone with Samsung. My Samsung pro has been in my ROCK NUC for years without a hiccup.

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If you can cancel the purchase, I highly recommend you get a better one, perhaps Samsung 970. The EVO or cheaper versions should be using TLC. Rugby’s 970 PRO is even better and uses MLC.

Search for the brand you purchased in this forum, and look at its track record.

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Given that the boot drive on a Nucleus is a fairly critical application, why not spend a few more pennies and invest in a ~3DWPD Enterprise grade SSD with a 5 year warranty?

I have a ROCK/NUC so I suppose I have this risk too. By the way, can you point me to the source data for these failures? I’m not questioning anyone’s veracity, just want to read more about the problem.

This happened to my Nucleus, and I was so happy Roon fixed it and had it back to me quickly. I didn’t know it was a thing that was going around. Now I’m worried that the next time I lose power it can happen again. To my understanding the only real difference between a Nuc running ROCK & a Nucleus is the case and the ssd partitioning. Pretty scary.

@Rugby @wklie @Graeme_Finlayson Thank you for your recommendations, I will keep them in mind in case I need to purchase yet another drive.

The thing is, though, I bought a Nucleus because I wanted a turn-key solution. I did not want to go through all the effort of building my own server, including all the research required. This is also why I ordered the same drive Roon Labs decided to use for the Nucleus. What I am wondering now is why Roon Labs are continuing to use a drive with this kind of track record?

I am not completely sure about what you mean with this, but there are several cases of SSD failures mentioned in this topic already and you can find more by searching this forum.

You can’t find the support topic about my specific case though, because customer support made the initially public topic a personal message for some reason. And I can’t seem to find another support topic I replied to just recently, I wonder if the same thing has happened to that as well.

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I purchased the Nucleus back in February and today had my THIRD Nucleus SSD failure in five months. I was away for a few days, tried to start up the app, and the whole thing fizzled yet again… This time I’m done. I don’t want a product where I’m holding my breath wondering if it will work.

Like some, I bought the Nucleus because I thought it would be an elegant turnkey solution because I don’t have the expertise to build a server. Big mistake. It would work for a month, then there be a month of back-and-forth with @support and getting a replacement SSD, then it would work for a month, break again, another month of back-and-forth with support with a whole new unit, another month of music, another break…

I tried external USB storage, internal SSD storage, changing cables, changing routers, giving it more breathing room in case it was overheating. And it’s not like there’s anything special at all about my setup. Ethernet from a router, Bluesound Node from same router, decent power conditioner, regular Apple apps. Nothing fancy or customized. Just a completely unreliable brick of a product.

I tried cloning the boot drive from a ROCK drive just to find out if I could. Didn’t succeed. What was your technique?

I was thinking about using an AppleTV Gen 1 boot clone program. It used ubuntu and got all of the partitions and data straight. I’ll have to dig up that program off of one of my old mac minis, though.

I used a Mac and this to determine what drives needed to be to and from

diskutil list

sudo dd if=/dev/diskx of=/dev/diskx conv=noerror,sync

then loaded the copy into gparted on ubuntu and expanded the largest partition to fill the SSD (in my case from 64GB to 128GB)

you need appropriate drive cradles/carriers etc.

if this is too much to comprehend then maybe its above your capabilities and I suggest you seek geek expertise :wink:

This sounds really really bad… Can you please share the brands, models and capacities of the drives in question?

It’s a Kingston A2000, 250GB. I don’t know what the other two were since they’re long gone. I didn’t bother to look since with the first two fails I was using an external USB for storage.

This failure appears far more catastrophic than the first two. This time you can’t even boot it or flash it from a USB.

They’ve been replacing them obviously, but each time it worked fine for about a month before it died. I guess it’s possible it was overheating, but I hadn’t used it in days so that would seem to be an issue on its own. It’s a shame because I wanted to love it. Cutting my losses on it and trying a NUC.

Just to be sure I’m not misunderstanding something, Roon Labs sent this to you as a replacement?

This is what happenened to me too. Could not even enter BIOS, and the Nucleus kept power cycling on its own.

Correct. This Kingston SSD was provided by Roon in a replacement Nucleus unit.

At the first failure, I shipped the unit back to Roon. They returned the same unit with a replacement SSD. When the Nucleus with the replacement SSD failed, I then received an entirely new Nucleus. I don’t know what model either of the first two SSD’s was because I was using exclusively external storage. I never opened the case.

When I received the new replacement unit I switched to internal storage to see if it would help. The Kingston was in the new replacement Nucleus unit from Roon. It appears to have failed in a different way from the other two occasions so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a different brand, but that’s just speculation.

Obviously Roon has been helpful getting replacements shipped and so forth. But there’s a limit to one’s patience. Waiting on the RMA to return it for the final time. Unfortunate all around.

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