Warning – images within this article may cause distress towards PC enthusiasts in particular: a Vietnamese user has posted on Facebook about the violent aftermath where 50 units of his Samsung NVMe SSDs had been bent and cracked in half, the perpetrator of which is none other than his 10-year-old son, who got too curious about testing the SSD’s durability.
Curiosity Kills SSDs
As Tom’s Hardware reported, the model involved is a OEM-specific model called PM991a, in this case the 512GB version; each unit is said to cost around 2 million Vietnamese Dong (~RM310), so the monetary loss here is stacking up to 100 million Dong, or around RM15,517 in damages; a total of 25.6TB of storage capacity is lost as well. In today’s PC components economy, the user is probably right about being “the most miserable dad in the world,” and we’re inclined to agree that “scolding him feels too mild for this.”
However, the somewhat fortunate takeaway here is these damaged parts may not be entirely paperweight, despite the violent damages they had been subjected to. Since 512GB SSDs have their components mostly crammed into a space much smaller than M.2 2280 form factor offers, the cracked section may just be cosmetic damage. Reason being, this storage configuration often involves just one NAND package, and sometimes they do away with DRAM chip to further reduce on-chip components, which in this case reduces the likelihood of terminal damage. In the worst-case scenario, at least the NAND packages should remain intact and salvageable.
Still, the biggest takeaway here shall be that any expensive components, be it SSDs, GPUs, or RAMs these days, should be kept from children’s reach (you can even consider SSDs a choking hazard given their tiny footprint as well). With PC components pricing as inflated as it is today, nobody wants to bear the cost of losing their hardware from unforced errors like this one.
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