Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
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Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
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Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#2I've experienced a few seriously strange issues with modern SSDs, even some of the better ones.
I had a 512GB Samsung drive that became very slow randomly at doing IO operations, the whole machine would die for 10-30 seconds at a time once or twice a day while any process that tried to use the disk became blocked on IO. Then it'd come right back like everything was perfectly fine.
Issues like this definitely worry me, we're basically completely blind as to what those controllers and flash chips are actually doing. Not that it wasn't a similar situation with HDD controllers before, but at least it didn't seem as unpredictable.
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#3I don't know why my hard drives died either. And while a physical motor breaking is more tangible, a contact wearing out is also imagineable. I don't really care why ssds or hdds die, I care that they do and therefore I have backups (well, ideally I would). I've had spinning rust fail on me while I was sitting at it and it didn't help me save it, it might as well have been dead in zero seconds.
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#4Call me crazy, but I don't think that a Crucial MX300 is the best choice for an enterprise worthy ZFS drive. I get what the author is concerned about, but I wouldn't be that surprised that a consumer level SSD failed in what sounds like a heavily used fileserver.
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#5"When a HD died early, you could also imagine undetected manufacturing flaws that finally gave way. With SSDs, at least in theory that shouldn't happen"
Why shouldn't it? Isn't it just hardware too?
"With spinning HDs, drives might die abruptly but you could at least construct narratives about what could have happened to do that"
Why can't you do the same with SSDs?
It feels like the author's main complaint is the frustration of not understanding SSD hardware as well.
Is this a valid complaint? Are SSDs magical in some way? I'm not an expert but... It's just hardware with pieces that do stuff. Why can't we come up with an understanding of why it fails?
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#6I've had a few SSD's give me random issues, and they are so hard to pin down, sometimes they just work, other times they abruptly stop, or just aren't detected until like 3 reboots later and they work fine. After you've had troubles they make you feel like you are hanging on a hope that the ground won't fall out from under you.
You also CAN'T HEAR if there is an issue, which acts as another warning sign that something might be going wrong or will go wrong soon. Loud tickings or clickings or overwork is a sure sign to start backing up and get ready to buy a new drive!
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#7Call me crazy, but I don't think that a Crucial MX300 is the best choice for an enterprise worthy ZFS drive. I get what the author is concerned about, but I wouldn't be that surprised that a consumer level SSD failed in what sounds like a heavily used fileserver.
Crucial? I can tell you most of them got spectek's chips inside, no wonder why they fail.
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#8"When a HD died early, you could also imagine undetected manufacturing flaws that finally gave way. With SSDs, at least in theory that shouldn't happen" Why shouldn't it? Isn't it just hardware too? "With spinning HDs, drives might die abruptly but you could at least construct narratives about what could have happened to do that" Why can't you do the same with SSDs? It feels like the author's main complaint is the fr…
Well to be fair, there is an entire layer of abstraction at the SSD controller level that does tons of black box magic. It allows the OS to treat the SSD as another other storage device without letting the OS know what is going on.
So the combination of non-moving parts (making it hard/impossible to debug via physical inspection) combined with a tons of wear leveling/misc magic can defo make it seem like SSD's are magical.
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#9"When a HD died early, you could also imagine undetected manufacturing flaws that finally gave way. With SSDs, at least in theory that shouldn't happen" Why shouldn't it? Isn't it just hardware too? "With spinning HDs, drives might die abruptly but you could at least construct narratives about what could have happened to do that" Why can't you do the same with SSDs? It feels like the author's main complaint is the fr…
> Why can't you do the same with SSDs?
Because they don't die incrementally. Wtih a hard disk you'll get bad sectors, growing slowly over time. Or a head crash and then it's all dead.
What could cause an entire SSD to die at once? I would totally understand bad sectors, but the whole thing at once? Where it doesn't even try to read existing data?
Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
#10In a way we need someone/something like Backblaze doing a SMART report about SSDs to let us know which SMART metrics we should be monitoring...
Because they've shown most metrics are kinda useless or mean different things from one manufacturer to the other.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-har... https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/