5 ms·

> "Intel doesn't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power

by martey 10y ago

> "Intel doesn't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power is cycled." I don't understand why Intel wouldn't just configure these drives to go into read-only mode permanently. If I realized my hard drive had become read-only and didn't suspect hard drive failure, my first inclination would be to reboot my computer, not immediately back up all data.

cuchulain 10y ago
The article is wrong on this point, and on Intel's intentions, as far as I can tell. Intel has a "Supernova" feature (http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/data-integrity-in-solid-state-drives-what-supernovas-mean-to-you/ http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/data-integrity-in-solid-state...) which will cause some drive models to brick themselves if certain conditions are met - errors in the control path, for example, which basically mean you cannot trust the drive at all. The supernova feature is only claimed for enterprise drives, and the 335 series is not an enterprise drive. I have a lot of experience with long-running Intel SSDs of various models, including pushing them to the same kinds of extreme that the SSD endurance experiment did, and I have never observed them to self-brick simply because they reached their flash endurance point. What I have observed is a number of firmware bugs (or possibly just the supernova feature) that caused the drive to brick on power cycle, even for drives in perfect health. I liked the SSD endurance articles, because they went a long way to allaying fears about SSDs, but I think it's a shame they've left this point in.
- rsmoz 10y ago
  > I have a lot of experience with long-running Intel SSDs of various models Hey, could I get your help selecting an Intel SSD model? Overwhelmed by the number of SKUs.
  - cuchulain 10y ago
    Sure. Can you see the email in my profile?
- StavrosK 10y ago
  My data point was that I got an Intel SSD back in 2010 (one of the first affordable ones, $500 for 160 GB) and it started showing bad sectors in 2013. I immediately copied all my data off, and sent it to intel, who sent me a replacement for free. The replacement has been working fine ever since.
- daemin 10y ago
  They did only have a sample size of 1 for each different drive type, so it's not exactly an exhaustive test.
wtallis 10y ago
I don't know Intel's reasoning for this policy, but if there's a sound technical reason for it, I would guess that it has to do with the drive not wanting to flush its NAND mapping information from DRAM to flash that it has deemed worn out. However, the Intel 335 Series uses SandForce controllers that don't have an external DRAM buffer, so they never have much data cached or in flight. It's more likely this policy was decided upon for enterprise products and was deemed not worth revising for client products given how few customers would exhaust the drive's write endurance to be affected by this. EDIT: And, as pointed out by cuchulain, much of the information about the intended end-of-life behavior of Intel's SSDs is unreliable; they don't publish that information on a per-model basis, so some of what you read is based on mere speculation.
mjevans 10y ago
Thanks for reminding me of the EXACT reason that Intel drives were on my personal blacklist of manufacturers to NEVER buy SSDs from.
- chrisbennet 10y ago
  When I read that I also thought "That's horrible, guess I won't buy that drive." When I read further though, I discovered that all the drives in his test become unreadable ("bricked"?) when they eventually failed.
  - smcl 10y ago
    Well for the others, if you really care about it you can see that sectors start getting remapped and think "ah ok time to start thinking about backing this data up and replace the drive" whereas if I understand correctly on the Intel one you pretty much immediately need to backup the data and hope that you don't need to restart or lose power before you've backed up what you need. I'm sure it's more nuanced than that but my reaction was definitely "steer clear of the Intel drives ..." when I read this so perhaps someone can clarify.
    - squarefoot 10y ago
      Backup shouldn't be something to do when the drive is exhaling its last breath or even showing first symptoms, it should be done often and in a transparent way. On a laptop the best practice is to arrange a sync with a server (NAS etc.) when one gets home. If done incrementally it requires from seconds to minutes and is fully automatic. Unfortunately making backups still isn't common practice; most users see a NAS or even an external drive as wasted money. They feel safe by "backing up" some data on a USB key only to discover how volatile and unsafe it might be when it's too late (breaks, washing machine, theft, loss, etc.)
rasz_pl 10y ago
It was a lie, Intel drive died due to firmware bugs, tldr its shiet despite Intel brand.
RealityVoid 10y ago
I remember having a contradictory discussion at work about the design of a emulated eeprom driver for some embedded product. We had the flash memory hardware rated for a number of erase/write cycles. The question was what should we do when the cycle number is greater than that rated number. I said we should continue functioning and eventually raise a warning or something. But my colleagues were saying we should simply kill the hardware and brick ourselves. I was adamantly against this but they were citing safety concerns that maybe the flash could get corrupted and we weren't supposed to support that long of a lifetime anyway. We had a lot of safety mechanisms and redundancies baked in so data corruption would not happen. And my argument was mainly that, yes, if unrecoverable data corruption happens, brick it, but until the hardware forces you to close shop, the SW should continue running as long as possible. I don't know what they ended up implementing because I soon left, but I think they went with the self-bricking option. Anyways, I just wanted to share this nice anecdote and I can't help but think that maybe somewhere, some Intel engineers had some discussion very similar to my own.

by martey 10y ago

cuchulain 10y ago

The article is wrong on this point, and on Intel's intentions, as far as I can tell. Intel has a "Supernova" feature (http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/data-integrity-in-solid-state-drives-what-supernovas-mean-to-you/ http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/data-integrity-in-solid-state...) which will cause some drive models to brick themselves if certain conditions are met - errors in the control path, for example, which basically mean you cannot trust the drive at all. The supernova feature is only claimed for enterprise drives, and the 335 series is not an enterprise drive. I have a lot of experience with long-running Intel SSDs of various models, including pushing them to the same kinds of extreme that the SSD endurance experiment did, and I have never observed them to self-brick simply because they reached their flash endurance point. What I have observed is a number of firmware bugs (or possibly just the supernova feature) that caused the drive to brick on power cycle, even for drives in perfect health. I liked the SSD endurance articles, because they went a long way to allaying fears about SSDs, but I think it's a shame they've left this point in.

rsmoz 10y ago
> I have a lot of experience with long-running Intel SSDs of various models Hey, could I get your help selecting an Intel SSD model? Overwhelmed by the number of SKUs.
- cuchulain 10y ago
  Sure. Can you see the email in my profile?
StavrosK 10y ago
My data point was that I got an Intel SSD back in 2010 (one of the first affordable ones, $500 for 160 GB) and it started showing bad sectors in 2013. I immediately copied all my data off, and sent it to intel, who sent me a replacement for free. The replacement has been working fine ever since.
daemin 10y ago
They did only have a sample size of 1 for each different drive type, so it's not exactly an exhaustive test.

wtallis 10y ago

I don't know Intel's reasoning for this policy, but if there's a sound technical reason for it, I would guess that it has to do with the drive not wanting to flush its NAND mapping information from DRAM to flash that it has deemed worn out. However, the Intel 335 Series uses SandForce controllers that don't have an external DRAM buffer, so they never have much data cached or in flight. It's more likely this policy was decided upon for enterprise products and was deemed not worth revising for client products given how few customers would exhaust the drive's write endurance to be affected by this. EDIT: And, as pointed out by cuchulain, much of the information about the intended end-of-life behavior of Intel's SSDs is unreliable; they don't publish that information on a per-model basis, so some of what you read is based on mere speculation.

mjevans 10y ago

Thanks for reminding me of the EXACT reason that Intel drives were on my personal blacklist of manufacturers to NEVER buy SSDs from.

chrisbennet 10y ago
When I read that I also thought "That's horrible, guess I won't buy that drive." When I read further though, I discovered that all the drives in his test become unreadable ("bricked"?) when they eventually failed.
- smcl 10y ago
  Well for the others, if you really care about it you can see that sectors start getting remapped and think "ah ok time to start thinking about backing this data up and replace the drive" whereas if I understand correctly on the Intel one you pretty much immediately need to backup the data and hope that you don't need to restart or lose power before you've backed up what you need. I'm sure it's more nuanced than that but my reaction was definitely "steer clear of the Intel drives ..." when I read this so perhaps someone can clarify.
  - squarefoot 10y ago
    Backup shouldn't be something to do when the drive is exhaling its last breath or even showing first symptoms, it should be done often and in a transparent way. On a laptop the best practice is to arrange a sync with a server (NAS etc.) when one gets home. If done incrementally it requires from seconds to minutes and is fully automatic. Unfortunately making backups still isn't common practice; most users see a NAS or even an external drive as wasted money. They feel safe by "backing up" some data on a USB key only to discover how volatile and unsafe it might be when it's too late (breaks, washing machine, theft, loss, etc.)

rasz_pl 10y ago

It was a lie, Intel drive died due to firmware bugs, tldr its shiet despite Intel brand.

RealityVoid 10y ago

I remember having a contradictory discussion at work about the design of a emulated eeprom driver for some embedded product. We had the flash memory hardware rated for a number of erase/write cycles. The question was what should we do when the cycle number is greater than that rated number. I said we should continue functioning and eventually raise a warning or something. But my colleagues were saying we should simply kill the hardware and brick ourselves. I was adamantly against this but they were citing safety concerns that maybe the flash could get corrupted and we weren't supposed to support that long of a lifetime anyway. We had a lot of safety mechanisms and redundancies baked in so data corruption would not happen. And my argument was mainly that, yes, if unrecoverable data corruption happens, brick it, but until the hardware forces you to close shop, the SW should continue running as long as possible. I don't know what they ended up implementing because I soon left, but I think they went with the self-bricking option. Anyways, I just wanted to share this nice anecdote and I can't help but think that maybe somewhere, some Intel engineers had some discussion very similar to my own.