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What's the wear-out failure mode of a modern SSD? Has anyone experienced it? Does it fail to read? Does it go read-only? Do OSes actually keep track of the sta

What's the wear-out failure mode of a modern SSD? Has anyone experienced it? Does it fail to read? Does it go read-only? Do OSes actually keep track of the stat and pop up a warning "Only 5% life left!"?

pifm_guy 4y ago
More than half the failures I have seen are 'electronics/firmware' problems. Ie. It is not caused by degradation of the flash memory, but instead caused by the controller going bad, refusing to initialize, having a bad internal power supply, etc. Obviously without the manufacturer's internal debug tools it's really hard to properly root cause issues.
- Unrectified 4y ago
  I thought about this as well.. I wish there was an easy way to find out which ssd brands get easy fwupd updates and such
Forge36 4y ago
I've had two failures. One started audibly clicking and I replaced before full failure (it support said it was common). Second failure was complete disconnect from the OS (USB drive) no warning. Once it cooled down i tried again, device appeared and reported no disk installed
- dale_glass 4y ago
  How can a SSD click?
Yizahi 4y ago
In the old test of Sata SSDs, all written to death, most of the drives was accessible after the last eventual write. None or almost none of the drives were even visible to the OS after system reboot. It seems that while memory itself may still be readable, the controller and OS can't handle such failure mode and it certainly wasn't tested. So I wouldn't expect any modern SSD to be readable after exhausting all writes completely. https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/ https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
Sakos 4y ago
Officially, they're supposed to go into read-only mode. In practice, out of the around 2 dozens of failures I've seen, a single one was still readable and the rest were complete loss of data. I wouldn't count on it, personally.

pifm_guy 4y ago

More than half the failures I have seen are 'electronics/firmware' problems. Ie. It is not caused by degradation of the flash memory, but instead caused by the controller going bad, refusing to initialize, having a bad internal power supply, etc. Obviously without the manufacturer's internal debug tools it's really hard to properly root cause issues.

Unrectified 4y ago
I thought about this as well.. I wish there was an easy way to find out which ssd brands get easy fwupd updates and such

Forge36 4y ago

I've had two failures. One started audibly clicking and I replaced before full failure (it support said it was common). Second failure was complete disconnect from the OS (USB drive) no warning. Once it cooled down i tried again, device appeared and reported no disk installed

dale_glass 4y ago
How can a SSD click?

Yizahi 4y ago

In the old test of Sata SSDs, all written to death, most of the drives was accessible after the last eventual write. None or almost none of the drives were even visible to the OS after system reboot. It seems that while memory itself may still be readable, the controller and OS can't handle such failure mode and it certainly wasn't tested. So I wouldn't expect any modern SSD to be readable after exhausting all writes completely. https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/ https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

Sakos 4y ago

Officially, they're supposed to go into read-only mode. In practice, out of the around 2 dozens of failures I've seen, a single one was still readable and the rest were complete loss of data. I wouldn't count on it, personally.