4 ms·

>Given everything else is solid state and will probably never fail Huh? Solid state drives do certainly fail, especially consumer parts. Ideally, IF Apple wer

>Given everything else is solid state and will probably never fail Huh? Solid state drives do certainly fail, especially consumer parts. Ideally, IF Apple were to source the best NAND silicone for reliability, and IF they had the best wear leveling algos implemented in NAND controller FW, and IF MacOS had optimal IO for write calls, and IF the soldering, temperatures, and voltage regulation to the NAND and controller were to be kept within ideal spec, then we could safely assume they might never fail, but that's a lot of IFs, and is why SSDs still fail quite a bit despite no moving parts. Which is why I refuse to buy PCs/laptops with soldered storage. That's like buying a car with the brake pads permanently attached to the chassis.

api 3y ago
Not often these days, and if you want them to really last the trick is to oversize them. If you need 2TiB get 4. That’s because wear is a function of amount written divided by the size or the drive due to wear leveling. For most people this advice doesn’t matter but if you do work on your laptop that involves tons and tons of writes (e.g. local Docker work with lots of huge container builds and multiple VMs) then over provisioning is good. It’s also very good advice for any server deployment you want to be reliable. If I were deploying a good old fashioned database box to be super reliable I’d oversize the SSD as much as possible (coupled with hot swap and mirroring).
- justapassenger 3y ago
  “Just buy 2x what you need” is not exactly equal to “it’s super reliable and never fail”.
  - dymk 3y ago
    Redundancy is a perfectly reasonable way to achieve reliability
    - justapassenger 3y ago
      Yes, it’s a reasonable way to achieve reliably of the whole system, as long as you have infinite money.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
They do, but it's uncommon. Having been using SSDs since at least 2011 or so, they've had a vastly better track record for me than HDDs have. In fact I have yet to see a single SSD of mine fail, whereas plenty of my HDDs have corrupted files or died. This probably varies from person to person though. Someone who's shuffling around tens or hundreds of gigabytes a video per day for example probably burns through them much more quickly than I do, with the most disk intensive thing I do being software development.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  Opposite experience from me. Never had a HDD fail ( I still have drives from the mid '00's running), but seen many SSDs fail, especially among the fleets at the companies I worked at, less so in my private life as I don't upgrade that often to have a large sample size. And the SSD fails were AFAIK never due to excessive wear from the user side but simply the SSD giving up the ghost out of nowhere probably due to faulty FW or faults in the NAND fabrication of RAM of the cache. SSD have enough points of failure despite no moving parts. HDDs would also fail more gracefully, like you'd usually get SMART warnings, crashes, strange noises before they'd inevitably die, but SSD simply just stop working one day out of the blue.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    I wonder if make and model of SSD factors in. Generally I've only purchased SSDs that have been proven reliable and don't try to cut costs by going for cheaper options with mystery meat controllers or cut rate NAND. As far as failing gracefully, for me HDDs have been a mixed bag. Some have shown warning signs beforehand but I've had a few that just up and died one day with their performance up until that point having been business as usual.
ericpauley 3y ago
MTBF of samsung flash parts is allegedly around 1.5Mh. That's one in 171 years. A battery, on the other hand, is (almost) guaranteed to need replacement after ~2000 cycles, or 32kh. That's a difference of 46x.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  SSDs fail not because of their NAND reaching MTBF. That would be the perfect world if that was the only variable.
  - ericpauley 3y ago
    This is MTBF of the entire drive (I used a Samsung 980 MTBF for reference). I think it's pretty clear that, barring accidental damage, the battery is by far the most likely failure point on macbooks.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      It is, but I've seen enough laptops go back to the IT department due to SSDs randomly dying on them way before their batteries died or them reaching their claimed MTBF which mostly applies to laboratory controlled conditions, not real world usage. Same with my old corporate HP. SSD (SK Hynix) died within one year.
      - ericpauley 3y ago
        That's the point of the M in MTBF: it's a mean. Some drives underperform, others overperform. One sampling from Backblaze shows this MTBF to be (roughly) accurate: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-review/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-... Another comparison (by proxy): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=mac%20logic%20board%20replacement,mac%20battery%20replacement&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]

api 3y ago

Not often these days, and if you want them to really last the trick is to oversize them. If you need 2TiB get 4. That’s because wear is a function of amount written divided by the size or the drive due to wear leveling. For most people this advice doesn’t matter but if you do work on your laptop that involves tons and tons of writes (e.g. local Docker work with lots of huge container builds and multiple VMs) then over provisioning is good. It’s also very good advice for any server deployment you want to be reliable. If I were deploying a good old fashioned database box to be super reliable I’d oversize the SSD as much as possible (coupled with hot swap and mirroring).

justapassenger 3y ago
“Just buy 2x what you need” is not exactly equal to “it’s super reliable and never fail”.
- dymk 3y ago
  Redundancy is a perfectly reasonable way to achieve reliability
  - justapassenger 3y ago
    Yes, it’s a reasonable way to achieve reliably of the whole system, as long as you have infinite money.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

They do, but it's uncommon. Having been using SSDs since at least 2011 or so, they've had a vastly better track record for me than HDDs have. In fact I have yet to see a single SSD of mine fail, whereas plenty of my HDDs have corrupted files or died. This probably varies from person to person though. Someone who's shuffling around tens or hundreds of gigabytes a video per day for example probably burns through them much more quickly than I do, with the most disk intensive thing I do being software development.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
Opposite experience from me. Never had a HDD fail ( I still have drives from the mid '00's running), but seen many SSDs fail, especially among the fleets at the companies I worked at, less so in my private life as I don't upgrade that often to have a large sample size. And the SSD fails were AFAIK never due to excessive wear from the user side but simply the SSD giving up the ghost out of nowhere probably due to faulty FW or faults in the NAND fabrication of RAM of the cache. SSD have enough points of failure despite no moving parts. HDDs would also fail more gracefully, like you'd usually get SMART warnings, crashes, strange noises before they'd inevitably die, but SSD simply just stop working one day out of the blue.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  I wonder if make and model of SSD factors in. Generally I've only purchased SSDs that have been proven reliable and don't try to cut costs by going for cheaper options with mystery meat controllers or cut rate NAND. As far as failing gracefully, for me HDDs have been a mixed bag. Some have shown warning signs beforehand but I've had a few that just up and died one day with their performance up until that point having been business as usual.

ericpauley 3y ago

MTBF of samsung flash parts is allegedly around 1.5Mh. That's one in 171 years. A battery, on the other hand, is (almost) guaranteed to need replacement after ~2000 cycles, or 32kh. That's a difference of 46x.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
SSDs fail not because of their NAND reaching MTBF. That would be the perfect world if that was the only variable.
- ericpauley 3y ago
  This is MTBF of the entire drive (I used a Samsung 980 MTBF for reference). I think it's pretty clear that, barring accidental damage, the battery is by far the most likely failure point on macbooks.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    It is, but I've seen enough laptops go back to the IT department due to SSDs randomly dying on them way before their batteries died or them reaching their claimed MTBF which mostly applies to laboratory controlled conditions, not real world usage. Same with my old corporate HP. SSD (SK Hynix) died within one year.
    - ericpauley 3y ago
      That's the point of the M in MTBF: it's a mean. Some drives underperform, others overperform. One sampling from Backblaze shows this MTBF to be (roughly) accurate: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-review/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-... Another comparison (by proxy): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=mac%20logic%20board%20replacement,mac%20battery%20replacement&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]