6 ms·
Also: Modern storage is plenty fast, but also not reliable for long term use. That is why I buy a new SSD every year and clone my current (worn out) SSD to the
by blindm 6y ago
Also: Modern storage is plenty fast, but also not reliable for long term use.
That is why I buy a new SSD every year and clone my current (worn out) SSD to the new one. I have several old SSDs that started to get unhealthy, well, according to my S.M.A.R.T utility that I used to check them. I could probably get away with using an SSD for another year, but will not risk the data loss. Anyone else do this?
- rcxdude 6y agoI've had one (very early and cheap) SSD fail on me. Other than that I don't think I've seen or heard of any issues across a large range of more modern SSDs. The reliability and endurange issues which occured on earlier SSDs no longer seem to be a problem (this is in part because flash density has skyrocketed: because each flash chip can operate more or less independently, the more storage an SSD has the faster it can run and the more write endurance it has).
- tjoff 6y agoThe solution for this problem is raid. Way cheaper and far superior in terms of reliability than your solution. Or if that isn't an option (laptop?) a good backup-solution that that runs daily or more often is also a better and cheaper alternative. Drives may dail at any time, but they don't age the way your post would suggest.
- blindm 6y agoI've looked into RAID. It seems a bit complicated to use. Is it trivial to create a RAID array in Linux with zero fuss and the whole thing 'just working' with very little knowledge of the filesystem itself other than it keeps your data 'safe' and redundancy baked in?
- dfinninger 6y agoDo you mean “use” or “setup”? RAID is trivial to use. Mount the volume to a directory and use it like normal. The setup is a bit more involved, but really not that bad. It’s a couple commands to join a few disks in an array and then you make a file system and mount it. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-raid-arrays-with-mdadm-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-crea...
- marcolussetti 6y agoEvery year seems like a very short lifespan, but I guess every usecase is different. I definitely replace drive when SMART is starting to look bleak, but that is far more infrequent in my usecase I guess.
- blindm 6y ago> Every year seems like a very short lifespan Yes but I forgot to mention I do a lot of heavy writes to it. It is common to see me creating a huge 20GB virtual machine disk image, using it for a few hours, then deleting it, before creating a new one in its place. I'm a huge virtualization freak.
- thekrendal 6y agoThat's still nothing even if you do that 4x/day. Also just because you create a 20GB virtual disk does not necessarily mean you're actually writing out 20GB to the disk. Many SSDs and NVMEs are designed with total drive writes per day in their specs. What is the wear method you're measuring by and what's the threshold where you're replacing your drives?
- blindm 6y ago> does not necessarily mean you're actually writing out 20GB to the disk. You mean like preallocation? I think Virtualbox now does that. In the past it didn't though, it just kept writing a bunch of zeroes to the drive until it reached 20GB.
- mmis1000 6y agoOr probably the filesystem decides to do it? The Refs will just ate adjacent 0 and assuming you want a fallocate here.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoThat is absolutely nothing in terms of the write endurance for modern drives
- Felk 6y agoI think having a backup solution is the better choice here. You can use your SSDs until they die or become too slow, and you won't lose your data if it breaks before you replace it after a year
- blindm 6y ago> I think having a backup solution is the better choice here Any particular provider you would recommend? I've looked into backblaze but it seems a bit pricey. Also: I am aware that cloud based backup solutions have very little failure rate in terms of drives since they're probably using RAID
- selectodude 6y ago$6/mo?
- tenacious_tuna 6y agoI use Backblaze's B2 (think S3) style storage for backup, and I'm paying about ~$4.50 USD for ~1TB of storage per month. I don't use a ton of bandwidth though, so if you have a lot of churn in the files you're backing up you could see higher costs, but looking over the numbers Backblaze as the cheapest solution by far to others I looked at.
- wtallis 6y agoNo. Hardly anyone does this, because it's just conspicuous consumption, not actually sensible. Have any of your SSDs ever used even half of their warrantied write endurance in a single year?
- zbrozek 6y agoWhat do you do that wears them out so fast? I've been running the same NVMe disk as my daily driver since 2015 and it's not showing any signs of degradation.
- blindm 6y ago> What do you do that wears them out so fast? I forgot to mention I do a lot of heavy writes to it. It is common to see me creating a huge 20GB virtual machine disk image, using it for a few hours, then deleting it, before creating a new one in its place. I'm a huge virtualization freak.
- ahupp 6y agoIn a lot of these systems (at least VMWare back when I used that, and Docker) you can clone an existing image with copy-on-write. This is a lot faster and would avoid 20GB of writes to spin up a new VM.
- pixl97 6y agoEh, still that is not that much data. I've had much longer life out of SSDs that are used as cache drives and perform a huge amount of writes per day, with Intel and Samsung drives that is. If you're losing drives that fast check your thermal management instead. Don't run your drives hot.
- Blahah 6y agoI work with bioinformatics data and tend to switch out an NVMe within 3-4 months. I'm usually maxing out read or write for 12 out of 24 hours a day. The slowdown is rapid and very noticeable.
- wtallis 6y ago> The slowdown is rapid and very noticeable. That probably doesn't have anything to do with write endurance of the flash memory. When your drive's flash is mostly worn-out, you will see latency affected as the drive has to retry reads and use more complex error correction schemes to recover your data. But there are several other mechanisms by which a SSD's performance will degrade early in its lifetime depending on the workload. Those performance degradations are avoidable to some extent, and are not permanent.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- porpoise 6y agoOn the one hand, a new SSD a year sounds extreme. On the other hand, how many years does each of us have left? Ten? twenty? Thirty? Forty? Few of us can easily imagine ourselves still alive and productive in forty years. So much of what we do rests on an implicit assumption that we are going to live for eternity, and starts to seem pointless when we consider how short our existence is.
- aszen 6y agoVery well said, there are times we lose the bigger picture of our lives and instead start wasting times with pointless stuff just to escape the reality of our lives.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoMaterialism (the dominant underlying philosophy of our culture) keeps us away from that higher level consciousness. It poisons our mental models and worldview.
- gravypod 6y agoIt will highly vary depending on use case. I have been using the same SSD (Samsung 850 evo) since 2015. First used on my gaming desktop, then on my college laptop, now in my gaming desktop again. I just make sure to keep it at ~25% to ~50% capacity to give the controller an easy time and I try to stick to mostly read only workloads (gaming). SMART report from that drive: https://pastebin.com/raw/HyPE6aHm https://pastebin.com/raw/HyPE6aHm For my disk for my exact use case: ~4 years of operation. 88% of lifespan remaining. Your mileage will almost definitely vary.
- LandR 6y agoI'm still on the SSD I bought 6 or 7 years ago as my OS drive. Haven't noticed a single issue on it.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoWhen ssds fail they don’t lose your data, they just become unwritable. What you’re doing is unnecessary and wasteful.
- magicalhippo 6y agoI've only had two SSDs fail on me, and in both cases they died without any warning. Didn't get discovered during boot or anything. Two different brands, very different uses. So while they _can_ fail in a graceful way, that's not been my experience.
- foolmeonce 6y agoI would add a new drive with zfs mirroring and enable simple compression. For most use cases it gets better read performance, ok write performance, and can tolerate both of the drives being a bit flaky so you can run it for a lot longer than the new drive alone.
- ggm 6y agoCan somebody please write up modern SSD and state of the world regarding data retention, modes, applicability for SSD replacing spinning rust "on the shelf" offline...
- wtallis 6y agoSSDs make no sense for offline archival. They're more expensive than hard drives and will be for the foreseeable future. You don't need the improved random IO performance or power efficiency for a drive that's mostly sitting on a shelf.
- ggm 6y agoIf what you have is an SSD, you need to know how applicable it is to unplug/remove it, and hold it offline. What I read is that this is not a good fit for how the data retention of an SSD works, it expects to be plugged in to power more frequently. If the storage is safe for 6 months to a year to 10 years, it would be good to know. I believe it may not be. I entirely agree that its not the medium of choice yet, if ever. LTO still exists for many people, perhaps 25+ TB hdd will make that moot.
- manigandham 6y agoConsumer SSDs have endurance ratings in TBW which is terabytes written over the lifespan. They're often in the 100s with some drives over 1000. The faster drives also use MLC or TLC which has lower latency, better endurance, and higher performance than the more higher capacity QLC. For example the Samsung 1TB 970 PRO (not the 980 PRO) has a 1200TBW rating with a 5 year warranty. That's 1.2M gigabytes written or more than 600GB every day, and will usually handle far more.