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Very strange understanding of the word "evidence". No sane SSD manufacturer would do such thing on purpose. You do it and you loose business, that's it. The s

Very strange understanding of the word "evidence". No sane SSD manufacturer would do such thing on purpose. You do it and you loose business, that's it. The simplest explanation is that somebody made an honest engineering mistake.

fartcannon 4y ago
Given the power dynamic between a single customer and large corporations, the smart thing to do is to assume malice until prove otherwise. This puts the onus on the corporations and, if we're lucky, creates an environment where they compete with each other to be seen as the most honest. The worst thing that happens is the single customer has to buy an SSD from someone they don't trust. If we do the opposite, as you say, and assume everything is an honest mistake, that puts pressure on the single customer to prove that the organization with a huge marketing budget is doing something wrong. In this situation, the worst thing that happens is we all get taken advantage of. Our collective distrust is the only power we have against massive marketing/PR budgets. It doesn't have to be angry, or sour, or cranky, we just collectively need to not take their word until we have a reason to do so.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Are you seriously saying that by default we should believe they intentionally planned to cause their customers to lose all of their data?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - alliao 4y ago
    planned obsolescence is quite a thing...?
    - dtjb 4y ago
      In some cases, but a product must fulfill its core purpose. If a SSD intentionally dumped data and self destructed at a set time, that would be disastrous for the brand. Same way a car doesn't adopt planned obsolescence by blowing up after 200k miles.
      - landemva 4y ago
        You are not a used car afficionado? 'This insulation prematurely disintegrates under normal use causing the wires it is designed to protect and insulate, to short causing many problems.' http://www.mercedesdefects.com/2008/04/wire-harness-defect.html http://www.mercedesdefects.com/2008/04/wire-harness-defect.h...
      - cmeacham98 4y ago
        > If a SSD intentionally dumped data and self destructed at a set time, that would be disastrous for the brand. Other than "intentionally" (which we cannot know and makes no difference to whether you lose your data or not) that is literally what these SSDs are doing, and no SSD brand has been destroyed over it.
      - bmicraft 4y ago
        What more could a manufacturer do to be "disastrous for the brand" than literally build an ssd that stops working after 40kh? Because this does not seem to qualify for you
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    If a spinning rust can run for ~8 years without any problems,a consumer SSD can hit beyond 40K hours reliably, and everything is checked and tested tens of times because of the complexity of flash storage, I'd get suspicious too. Also, enterprise drives get firmware updates (regardless of spinning or not), and this firmware is automatically applied via RAID controller, so it could be remedied easily before it got this big if it's an actual error.
  - helionsantos 4y ago
    Considering immoral practices adopted by corporations, such as vendor lock-in, use of slave work (directly or indirectly), law bending for its own interests, supporting and conducting biased research towards its own interests among others, I would say that is quite sensible to believe it. Big corporations, per se, are not evil entities. The people running them might or might not be, and when you have evil/immoral people running things, unless there are good control measures in place, they might take bad decisions.
bayindirh 4y ago
When you purchase a server (fleet), you get a long warranty with it. Generally 3 to 5 years. So you expect this fleet to stay in service for <=5 years mostly. Unless you burn through your SSDs, you're very unlikely to hit this event. When these servers' continue to be used and disks all start to fail at the same time, this will obviously stink. The bathtub curve is not like this. You can feel that.
- toast0 4y ago
  40k hours is a little more than 4.5 years. These drives deterministically fail at that uptime (unless firmware is updated) and most servers are on 24x7, so if you run your servers for 5 years, it's highly likely you'd run into this. If you run your SSDs hard and they fail early as a result, then you'd be spared from this mass death. Or if you use three year leases and replace on a schedule. Now more than ever, five year old server hardware isn't that far behind the curve unless you're on the bleeding edge. I've been looking for bottom of the barrel hosting lately, and there's lots of dedicated servers available with 10+ year old cpus, and probably most of the rest of the machine is a similar age.
  - jstrong 4y ago
    you have any recs for lower-end bare metal providers?
    - toast0 4y ago
      I haven't used them yet, but take a look at dedicated server offers at LowEndTalk and Web Hosting Talk. Obviously, there's some offers that are sketchier than others, and a lot of resale, but if your needs are low, there's some neat stuff.

fartcannon 4y ago

Given the power dynamic between a single customer and large corporations, the smart thing to do is to assume malice until prove otherwise. This puts the onus on the corporations and, if we're lucky, creates an environment where they compete with each other to be seen as the most honest. The worst thing that happens is the single customer has to buy an SSD from someone they don't trust. If we do the opposite, as you say, and assume everything is an honest mistake, that puts pressure on the single customer to prove that the organization with a huge marketing budget is doing something wrong. In this situation, the worst thing that happens is we all get taken advantage of. Our collective distrust is the only power we have against massive marketing/PR budgets. It doesn't have to be angry, or sour, or cranky, we just collectively need to not take their word until we have a reason to do so.

charcircuit 4y ago
Are you seriously saying that by default we should believe they intentionally planned to cause their customers to lose all of their data?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- alliao 4y ago
  planned obsolescence is quite a thing...?
  - dtjb 4y ago
    In some cases, but a product must fulfill its core purpose. If a SSD intentionally dumped data and self destructed at a set time, that would be disastrous for the brand. Same way a car doesn't adopt planned obsolescence by blowing up after 200k miles.
    - landemva 4y ago
      You are not a used car afficionado? 'This insulation prematurely disintegrates under normal use causing the wires it is designed to protect and insulate, to short causing many problems.' http://www.mercedesdefects.com/2008/04/wire-harness-defect.html http://www.mercedesdefects.com/2008/04/wire-harness-defect.h...
    - cmeacham98 4y ago
      > If a SSD intentionally dumped data and self destructed at a set time, that would be disastrous for the brand. Other than "intentionally" (which we cannot know and makes no difference to whether you lose your data or not) that is literally what these SSDs are doing, and no SSD brand has been destroyed over it.
    - bmicraft 4y ago
      What more could a manufacturer do to be "disastrous for the brand" than literally build an ssd that stops working after 40kh? Because this does not seem to qualify for you
- bayindirh 4y ago
  If a spinning rust can run for ~8 years without any problems,a consumer SSD can hit beyond 40K hours reliably, and everything is checked and tested tens of times because of the complexity of flash storage, I'd get suspicious too. Also, enterprise drives get firmware updates (regardless of spinning or not), and this firmware is automatically applied via RAID controller, so it could be remedied easily before it got this big if it's an actual error.
- helionsantos 4y ago
  Considering immoral practices adopted by corporations, such as vendor lock-in, use of slave work (directly or indirectly), law bending for its own interests, supporting and conducting biased research towards its own interests among others, I would say that is quite sensible to believe it. Big corporations, per se, are not evil entities. The people running them might or might not be, and when you have evil/immoral people running things, unless there are good control measures in place, they might take bad decisions.

bayindirh 4y ago

When you purchase a server (fleet), you get a long warranty with it. Generally 3 to 5 years. So you expect this fleet to stay in service for <=5 years mostly. Unless you burn through your SSDs, you're very unlikely to hit this event. When these servers' continue to be used and disks all start to fail at the same time, this will obviously stink. The bathtub curve is not like this. You can feel that.

toast0 4y ago
40k hours is a little more than 4.5 years. These drives deterministically fail at that uptime (unless firmware is updated) and most servers are on 24x7, so if you run your servers for 5 years, it's highly likely you'd run into this. If you run your SSDs hard and they fail early as a result, then you'd be spared from this mass death. Or if you use three year leases and replace on a schedule. Now more than ever, five year old server hardware isn't that far behind the curve unless you're on the bleeding edge. I've been looking for bottom of the barrel hosting lately, and there's lots of dedicated servers available with 10+ year old cpus, and probably most of the rest of the machine is a similar age.
- jstrong 4y ago
  you have any recs for lower-end bare metal providers?
  - toast0 4y ago
    I haven't used them yet, but take a look at dedicated server offers at LowEndTalk and Web Hosting Talk. Obviously, there's some offers that are sketchier than others, and a lot of resale, but if your needs are low, there's some neat stuff.