Boy Bends 50 SSDs Worth $3800 in Dad's 'Strength Test,' Story Isn't Over

The Unfortunate Experiment: A Ten-Year-Old's SSD Devastation

In an era where memory prices are skyrocketing faster than gold, a rather unconventional experiment unfolded in a Vietnamese household. A ten-year-old boy, driven by an apparent curiosity about durability, took it upon himself to test the structural integrity of his father's solid-state drives (SSDs). The results, as one might expect, were catastrophic, leaving a trail of bent and broken components that would make any PC builder weep.

The saga began in a Facebook group ironically named "Building PCs is Easy," where the self-proclaimed "unluckiest dad in the world" shared his devastating discovery. His son, instead of contributing to the ease of PC assembly, had managed to significantly exacerbate the NAND memory deficit within his own home. This incident comes at a particularly painful time, as prices for RAM, graphics cards, and SSDs are currently experiencing a dramatic surge, making the loss even more financially impactful.

A Costly Lesson in Bending Metal

The young vandal's destructive endeavor involved a staggering fifty NVMe SSDs, each with a 512GB capacity. The father lamented, "Scolding him is too mild a punishment." The sheer scale of the damage is evident in the accompanying photographs, which depict the drives bent in half, resembling misshapen bananas, with some showing cracks at the point of flexion. Such deformation renders them utterly useless for their intended purpose, making them incompatible with almost any computing hardware.

At an estimated 2 million Vietnamese dong per drive (approximately $76 USD at current exchange rates), the total financial toll for this "strength test" amounts to a staggering $3800. Reports suggest these were likely Samsung PM991a 512GB M.2 2280 OEM components, which are notoriously difficult to source through standard retail channels. Further investigation by Tom's Hardware found similar drives on eBay priced around $60, potentially reducing the father's direct financial loss to closer to $3000. Even with this adjusted figure, the damage remains substantial and deeply frustrating.

What's Next for the Broken Bits?

While the immediate aftermath of the incident is filled with parental despair, the story might not be entirely over. The very nature of SSDs, particularly the resilience of their individual NAND flash chips, offers a glimmer of hope, albeit a slim one. It's plausible that some of the drives, despite their mangled appearance, might still possess intact NAND chips that could be salvaged. This opens up the possibility, however remote, of a future where these damaged components are repurposed for analysis, repair attempts, or even for harvesting usable NAND chips. Such efforts, if undertaken, could certainly generate significant online attention and potentially provide valuable insights into the limits of SSD resilience, or simply satisfy the curiosity of tech enthusiasts eager to see what can be salvaged from such a dramatic incident.

The boy's experiment not only depleted a significant portion of his father's valuable storage inventory but also highlighted the extreme fragility of these high-performance components when subjected to unconventional forces.