A viral story from Vietnam has caught global attention. According to Tom’s Hardware, a ten-year-old boy destroyed an entire inventory of 50 SSD drives that belonged to his father.
The incident came to light through a Facebook group called “Build a PC is Easy,” where the father shared photos of the bent and useless drives. He explained that his son had performed what he called an innocent durability test.
What Happened to the SSDs?
The damaged hardware was identified as the Samsung PM991a, a common NVMe M.2 SSD used in OEM systems. Each drive had a capacity of 512 GB, which adds up to a total storage loss of about 25.6 TB.
Considering current market prices and exchange rates, the total damage is estimated to be between $3,000 and $4,000.
As noted by Tom’s Hardware, the timing of this accident couldn’t be worse. In his post, the father said that “RAM, graphics cards, SSDs, CPUs… are all going up in price—rising even faster than gold.”
The global NAND memory industry is facing shortages and higher production costs, making replacements much more expensive now than just a few months ago.
Can the Drives Be Saved?
From a technical perspective, there is a small chance that some of the drives might still work. Since M.2 2280 SSDs have most of their critical components grouped near the connector, a few units might survive if those areas weren’t broken.
However, because the printed circuit boards (PCBs) were bent into an arc shape, their commercial value is effectively zero, and installing them in a standard motherboard would be risky and unsafe.
