Case Dan A4 v4.1
Motherboard Z690I Strix Gaming
Processor i5-12400F
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-L9i-17xx Chromax Black
Noctua NA-FD1
Memory Corsair CMK32GX5M2B5200C40
GPU GeForce RTX 3070 Eagle
Storage 2 x Seagate Firecuda 530 1TB
Case fans 2 x Noctua A9x14 HS-PWM chromax.Black.swap
PSU Corsair SF750
And one day after months of use it froze mid-game and went into a BIOS loop and wouldn't boot. I quickly realized that only one of the Seagate Firecuda 530 SSDs was detected. After some unscrewing and experimenting with the two drives in the two slots I found that one of them was dead.
And then I left the PC alone for a few days and turned it on again. It booted into Windows and immediately crashed.
That made me wonder if the failure was temperature related; when cool it seemed to work. So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes. Inserting it into an NVMe M.2 USB case I was able to see the drive on my Mac. Success!
Well, for a few minutes. It seemed that as the drive heated up it failed again. Which lead me to believe that there was a faulty connection somewhere on the board. Very careful plugging and unplugging of the board helped me find the right spot to squeeze one of the chips to make the SSD work: no low temperatures needed.
Now, I couldn't possibly sit and hold the SSD squeezing the chip while I copied off the data so I came up with another solution. A metal G clamp and strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card under the SSD to support the PCB.
Here's the contraption with just the right amount of turns on the G clamp to get the SSD to work.
But, of course, the SSD gets quite hot during operation so I used one of the heatsinks from the PC and another made from part of carpentry square and some thermal adhesive tape to keep things cool.
During the copy operation I kept an eye on the temperatures with the thermal camera in my CAT S60 phone. Toasty.
With that combination I was able to copy the /Users directory off the drive for safekeeping. After that I decided to push my luck an image the entire drive into a single 1TB file using dd.
I'm tempted to try to permanently fix the SSD using my SMD hot air blower. But maybe I should just replace it at this point.
PS I couldn't resist using the SMD hot air blower on the chip with the red arrow on it below, and now the SSD works without having woodworking tools applied to it! It even boots in the PC.
And this story finally ends after I was able to make a Windows System Image of that SSD on a separate drive, and then use that image to restore the entire Windows machine onto a fresh Firecuda. And I enabled backups.