7 ms·

I finished the life of a SSD in a single year of regular use; it was great to find it should not happen, but it did.

by AdrianB1 5y ago

wtallis 5y ago
What drive? What was the end of life behavior you observed? Catastrophic failure, or SMART data showing wearout?
- nightski 5y ago
  Not the parent but I had this happen to me. It was a top of the line Samsung SSD at the time. Catastrophic failure. Was working fine then one day I rebooted and it never came back. I usually plan for failure of each drive every 2-3 years and buy them on Black Friday. But if that took out my entire 3.5k-4k m1 max laptop I'd be rather disappointed. It's $200 to replace a SSD.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    So, that failure mode makes it pretty much impossible to conclusively attribute it to wearing out the NAND write endurance. You probably hit a firmware bug or failure in a different SSD component, otherwise you would most likely have been getting warnings from your OS about impending drive failure based on SMART data. SSD wrote endurance is an unavoidable ticking time bomb. But it is nowhere near as unpredictable or imminent as many people assume. It's a failure mode that doesn't sneak up on you, and usually takes real effort to trigger. Other failure mechanisms are much more important.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    I've had two SSD's fail on, both were "here today, gone tomorrow" type failures without warning. Granted, been a while, but I do nightly full-disk backups due to the first such experience (so was well prepared for the second).
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  Intel 535. I was showing some alerts and the Intel SSD tool said the remaining life was ~ 5%, then it got to zero so I replaced it.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    That model had a known issue with excessively high write amplification, for which Intel published a firmware fix: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18821/26452/ssd-non-searchable-fixes-and-misc-tools.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18821/26452... In general, you should be aware that the "life remaining" indicator may merely be the "warranty remaining" indicator. If the unused reserved block count isn't approaching zero, a drive can usually keep operating long past the official write endurance rating. However, in addition to the above bug, Intel is also known for putting a kill switch in their SSD firmware tied to the "life remaining" counter, so you might have actually experienced the SSD going read-only when that hits zero.

I finished the life of a SSD in a single year of regular use; it was great to find it should not happen, but it did.

wtallis 5y ago

What drive? What was the end of life behavior you observed? Catastrophic failure, or SMART data showing wearout?

nightski 5y ago
Not the parent but I had this happen to me. It was a top of the line Samsung SSD at the time. Catastrophic failure. Was working fine then one day I rebooted and it never came back. I usually plan for failure of each drive every 2-3 years and buy them on Black Friday. But if that took out my entire 3.5k-4k m1 max laptop I'd be rather disappointed. It's $200 to replace a SSD.
- wtallis 5y ago
  So, that failure mode makes it pretty much impossible to conclusively attribute it to wearing out the NAND write endurance. You probably hit a firmware bug or failure in a different SSD component, otherwise you would most likely have been getting warnings from your OS about impending drive failure based on SMART data. SSD wrote endurance is an unavoidable ticking time bomb. But it is nowhere near as unpredictable or imminent as many people assume. It's a failure mode that doesn't sneak up on you, and usually takes real effort to trigger. Other failure mechanisms are much more important.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  I've had two SSD's fail on, both were "here today, gone tomorrow" type failures without warning. Granted, been a while, but I do nightly full-disk backups due to the first such experience (so was well prepared for the second).
AdrianB1 5y ago
Intel 535. I was showing some alerts and the Intel SSD tool said the remaining life was ~ 5%, then it got to zero so I replaced it.
- wtallis 5y ago
  That model had a known issue with excessively high write amplification, for which Intel published a firmware fix: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18821/26452/ssd-non-searchable-fixes-and-misc-tools.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18821/26452... In general, you should be aware that the "life remaining" indicator may merely be the "warranty remaining" indicator. If the unused reserved block count isn't approaching zero, a drive can usually keep operating long past the official write endurance rating. However, in addition to the above bug, Intel is also known for putting a kill switch in their SSD firmware tied to the "life remaining" counter, so you might have actually experienced the SSD going read-only when that hits zero.