31–40 of 258 posts
I 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.
"We had one SSD fail in this way and then come back when it was pulled out and reinserted, apparently perfectly healthy, which doesn't inspire confidence." We've experienced exactly the same thing. Our general course of action is to perform a hard power cycle of the server through IPMI - a warm cycle doesn't seem to work. I've always presumed it was down to dodgy SSD controller firmware given the way it suddenly stop…
It's sort of a devil's bargain - the performance of SSDs is so much better that I can't pass up using it over a spinning disk even if they occasionally lose everything. There was a great game for the original Nintendo called "Pinball Quest". As you advanced through the game you could get upgrades such as side stoppers, stronger flippers, etc. You bought these items from a demon in between levels. After the red "Strong Flippers", the next upgrade was the purple "Devil's Flippers". The trick was that occasionally they'd turn to stone when you needed them and possibly cause you to lose the pinball. But they were such an upgrade over the Strong Flippers (when they weren't turned to stone) that you bought them anyway.
SSDs are kind of like that.
Two questions- how do major cloud providers (azure,aws,heroku)handle storage failures? What are some best practices for personal hard drive crash warly-warning?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
One potential cause is poorly constructed drive firmware which fails to account for a minor failure of some kind and crashes. If that unaccounted minor failure is persistent, the firmware may crash constantly and then you'd be unable to access even theoretically good parts of the drive. Firmware -- undebuggable, unobservable, unfixable software, jammed into your devices -- is the enemy.
Call 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.
TL;DR Lack of noises makes SSD drives bad at motivating users to do backups or use redundant storage: they don't seem to be on the verge of catastrophic failure.
I 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.
I'm a little scared about my new SSDs that have replaced a few rust-spinners in our data center.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ma…
Is there a good reason why we use separate SSD controllers instead of letting the primary cpu handle it? The obvious reason is backwards compatibility, but as more of computing moves to SSDs, is this still relevant? ZFS has shown that removing layers of abstraction with regard to storage can be beneficial.
"We had one SSD fail in this way and then come back when it was pulled out and reinserted, apparently perfectly healthy, which doesn't inspire confidence." We've experienced exactly the same thing. Our general course of action is to perform a hard power cycle of the server through IPMI - a warm cycle doesn't seem to work. I've always presumed it was down to dodgy SSD controller firmware given the way it suddenly stop…
I have three SSDs in three different laptops/desktops. In their current host machines they've been working flawlessly for a couple of years. Prior to my figuring out which SSD paired best with which host machine, I experienced intermittent strange and catastrophic problems (unreadable sectors to complete data loss) with each one. These were different brands, different capacities, bought in different years. It's sort…
A major problem with SSDs seems to be “firmware death” - where the flash chips are physically fine (or mostly fine), but the firmware (or firmware memory) has gotten corrupted due to some programming error, electrical glitch, or cosmic ray. I’ve had scores of older SSDs die after things like power outages and sudden shutdown events. This is super frustrating because the data is physically OK but the controller just i…