what would / could cause this to happen?

[Marzipan]

I've got an ancient 480GB Intel 730 SSD that was full of stuff when I pulled it out of my M900x Tiny a few months back. just tried to access from a SATA enclosure and it shows as unallocated space. popped it out and connected it via a USB to SATA adapter, same thing. what's going on with it? I would think if it suffered a static shock while sitting there it would be entirely pooched and not show up as unallocated in disk manager. /much annoyed.

 

[djbrad]

A ssd loses the data if not powered up for a long time. That's why they should never be used for backups.

You could try to recover with a software, but to be honest, it does not look good.

Last thing to try would be to boot from a live linux distro and verify if you can mount and see something.

 

[Lysrin]

A ssd loses the data if not powered up for a long time. That's why they should never be used for backups.
*snip*

I think that timeline is in the range of 2-5 years or so without power, so not an issue if you are powering up the drive every few months or so, but given the age of the drive in this case, that could be an issue.

But if the drive was powered on in the M900x "a few months back" before it was removed, then maybe the lack of power isn't the issue.

 

[Marzipan]

that suxors. fortunately, I don't think there was anything important on it...just a queue of shows I wanted to watch mostly. still an annoyance because I don't remember all the shows, I had setup to view, LoL!

 

[djbrad]

Or it's just badluck. When a sdd dies, it's often without warning. Next boot and then poof, nothing.

I had 3 ssd that died in what, 20 years? All went that way. Corsair, Kingston, and crucial.