3 ms·

this is the trouble with ssds, they just die. but they're fast before they do. but it's ok because everyone has backups right? i know i do, and raid1 just incas

by n0body 12y ago

this is the trouble with ssds, they just die. but they're fast before they do. but it's ok because everyone has backups right? i know i do, and raid1 just incase. on a side note, glad i paid the extra cost for the 840 pro!

ZoFreX 12y ago
> this is the trouble with ssds, they just die As opposed to hard drives, which are always so good about failing predictably /s My take away was that SSDs are somewhat easy to predict failure on. I'd take predictable failure over unpredictable any day.
- n0body 12y ago
  in my experience hdds have signs they're going to die soon, they go slow, click a lot, get smart errors, things get corrupt etc. where as with flash media it all seems fine, but suddenly isn't. not that this is a rule, i've seen hdds fail instantly for no reason as well, and flash media throw a massive wobbler but still be recoverable. but in my experience this is not the normal behaviour. but who cares as long as you have backups and a contingency plan?
  - bluedino 12y ago
    You can see the sector reallocations and things happening with the SSD's as they wear.
  - ZoFreX 12y ago
    Google's study[1] on spinning disk drives found that predicting failure from SMART data is not very accurate. [1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  You can almost always recover data from broken HDD, you will never be able to recover from SSD failure (one exception is fried fuse).
xenadu02 12y ago
The critical difference is the SSDs all indicated they were "past expiration date" with the SMART wear indicators. The Samsung indicators were overly conservative it appears, dropping to dead long before the drive actually died. Their software is garbage though, reporting a healthy drive even though the SMART indicators are telling you it is close to death. Obviously they never bothered to test a nearly-expired drive... probably the same reason the Intel drive bricked itself instead of coming up in read-only mode. I doubt they tested this scenario very well (not that we software engineers ever just test the golden path either...) In any case, all the drives so far indicated they were destined to keel over via the SMART attributes long before it actually happened... Certainly long enough to buy a new drive and copy all the data, even for the less reliable TLC drive. In fact even under a heavy workstation load you'd have enough time to save up money working a minimum wage part-time job, order the SSD when it goes on sale, wait for it to arrive via ground shipping, forget that you need an external SATA adapter, save up for that, order it, wait for shipping, then copy the data. My original Intel X25-M G2, which I used for several years in my daily workstation, had around 4 TB total writes before I replaced it. That's two orders of magnitude lower than the apparent limit for these drives.
- alphapapa 12y ago
  > In fact even under a heavy workstation load you'd have enough time to save up money working a minimum wage part-time job, order the SSD when it goes on sale, wait for it to arrive via ground shipping, forget that you need an external SATA adapter, save up for that, order it, wait for shipping, then copy the data. That's a really interesting metric. Can we call that the xenadu factor?

by n0body 12y ago

ZoFreX 12y ago

> this is the trouble with ssds, they just die As opposed to hard drives, which are always so good about failing predictably /s My take away was that SSDs are somewhat easy to predict failure on. I'd take predictable failure over unpredictable any day.

n0body 12y ago
in my experience hdds have signs they're going to die soon, they go slow, click a lot, get smart errors, things get corrupt etc. where as with flash media it all seems fine, but suddenly isn't. not that this is a rule, i've seen hdds fail instantly for no reason as well, and flash media throw a massive wobbler but still be recoverable. but in my experience this is not the normal behaviour. but who cares as long as you have backups and a contingency plan?
- bluedino 12y ago
  You can see the sector reallocations and things happening with the SSD's as they wear.
- ZoFreX 12y ago
  Google's study[1] on spinning disk drives found that predicting failure from SMART data is not very accurate. [1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
rasz_pl 12y ago
You can almost always recover data from broken HDD, you will never be able to recover from SSD failure (one exception is fried fuse).

xenadu02 12y ago

The critical difference is the SSDs all indicated they were "past expiration date" with the SMART wear indicators. The Samsung indicators were overly conservative it appears, dropping to dead long before the drive actually died. Their software is garbage though, reporting a healthy drive even though the SMART indicators are telling you it is close to death. Obviously they never bothered to test a nearly-expired drive... probably the same reason the Intel drive bricked itself instead of coming up in read-only mode. I doubt they tested this scenario very well (not that we software engineers ever just test the golden path either...) In any case, all the drives so far indicated they were destined to keel over via the SMART attributes long before it actually happened... Certainly long enough to buy a new drive and copy all the data, even for the less reliable TLC drive. In fact even under a heavy workstation load you'd have enough time to save up money working a minimum wage part-time job, order the SSD when it goes on sale, wait for it to arrive via ground shipping, forget that you need an external SATA adapter, save up for that, order it, wait for shipping, then copy the data. My original Intel X25-M G2, which I used for several years in my daily workstation, had around 4 TB total writes before I replaced it. That's two orders of magnitude lower than the apparent limit for these drives.

alphapapa 12y ago
> In fact even under a heavy workstation load you'd have enough time to save up money working a minimum wage part-time job, order the SSD when it goes on sale, wait for it to arrive via ground shipping, forget that you need an external SATA adapter, save up for that, order it, wait for shipping, then copy the data. That's a really interesting metric. Can we call that the xenadu factor?