Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#81

Post by relieferator » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #14

hanikesn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact same thing happens hard drives. There's a ton of magic going on.

Lots of extra magic happens in an SSD though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5JoC4-qsO0 https://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Solid_State_Drive_(SSD)_F...

Thanks for this youtube link. In the case of recovering deleted files from SSD's that have the trim command enabled (Forensics Writeblocker was used,) the following drives have a low probability of recoverability: Crucial, Intel, and Samsung (3core controller). Whereas Seagate, Supertalent (parallel ATA to SATA bridge chip,) OCZ, and Patriot; files could be recovered. If the drive is quick-formatted, and if trim is enabled, the data is completely gone on the following drives: Crucial, Intel and Samsung. The trim state impacts the most whether or not the data can be recovered. You can check if trim is enabled with the command: fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify - if your result is 0, it is enabled (default).

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#82

Post by dogben » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

Crucial is using low grade NAND on some of the products: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/a4uwag/spectek_fl...

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#83

Post by sigstoat » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #51

blincoln wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't it? Isn't it just hardware too? In a mechanical hard drive, there are moving parts which can wear out due to friction, etc. SSDs are solid-state, so it seems like at least theoretically, it should be possible to build one that keeps working for decades. e.g. I have solid-state hardware from the 70s and 80s which still functions. I've always been a little mystified as to why SSDs' data areas wear out for…

On the subject of capacitor death. Is there a robotic device that can take in a circuit board and swap out all the [electrolytic] caps?

i've never seen or heard of an automated board rework system. thinking about the steps and things i've had to do to manually rework boards, your machine would need not only be able to apply force to pull parts off of boards without damaging the board, but also be prepared to restore pads / through holes to usable states after desoldering parts, before new ones could go back in.

there's a reason companies don't repair circuit boards in consumer electronics.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#84

Post by SomeHacker44 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #25

bluejay2387 wrote: post #22

Maybe I am being overly simplistic, but shouldn't it not matter? Who in the modern age doesn't back up everything all the time? Don't we all operate with the assumption these things are going to blow at any time? 90%+ of my data is on cloud storage now anyway. When a SSD goes out don't you just chunk it in the drawer of old drives that you promise to take to the disposal center this weekend (and never do) and then ta…

Replacing an SSD is not free, and in most cases it's not easy. Maybe an IT pro can just roll down to the computer store for a new one, put it in their laptop (for free!), and throw a $100+ drive in a drawer without even thinking about warranty, but most people can't. A backup doesn't excuse excessive rates of failure and weird glitches.

Replacing an SSD in a modern Apple laptop is literally impossible. You need to replace the whole dang laptop (or motherboard, whatever they call it these days), which is not something a user can do.

Thank goodness for Backblaze, Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, Drobo and Synology. Maybe I have gone overboard, but I have not lost any data in 12+ years.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#85

Post by minikites » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #60

Severian wrote: post #4

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.

To be fair, the 'I' in RAID stands for 'inexpensive'.

I think a lot of people know the I as "Independent" these days since RAID is usually an enterprise feature with enterprise costs.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#86

Post by SomeHacker44 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #36

HelloNurse wrote: post #17

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 think operating systems should be programmed to wipe out a drive completely once early in the life of every user (around age 20-ish) to burn in their brain the need to back up!

My father had the same concept in getting into a car crash early in my driving life. "Now that you have gotten that out of your system (and I'm glad you're fine), don't ever do it again."

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#87

Post by rb808 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #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 fr…

I think the difference is familiarity. We've been using hard drives for decades so kinda know what to expect. SSDs have only been widely used 5-10y, so we're all just getting used to know how they work and how they die.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#88

Post by soneil » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #30

It may be irrational, but I remain very distrustful of SSDs, in part for reasons like this. I use them occasionally as temporary storage, but I don't use them for anything that would cause me a headache if the drive died without warning. So far, my observation is that their lifespan is considerably shorter than spinning platter drives, and spinning platter drives typically give plenty of warning before actually dying…

I'm just distrustful of drives. All storage is essentially cache, and should be treated like it.

I'm of the opinion that harddrives don't actually function, they just maintain the illusion while they wait for a more interesting moment to die.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#89

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #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 fr…

[deleted]

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#90

Post by loeg » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

I recently had a similar SSD failure, although it wasn't in a "new fileserver" but my daily use 2013 desktop. It was working, then it was producing write errors corrupting my filesystem, then the whole system died, very quickly. Fortunately for me, some data was recoverable from the corrupted disk; I had a local backup from 12h prior, and a tarsnap backup from about the same time back.

(Um, here's where I have to be critical of tarsnap: their recovery performance is absolutely abysmal for small files. They're latency bound between you, their EC2 instance, and the backing S3 store. Think single or double digit kB/s and then think about how much data you back up with tarsnap. I can't recommend any other backup provider better, but this is an experience where tarsnap left me very disappointed.)

Looking at that SSD and my other SSDs' SMART data, they report extra blocks remaining in SMART, and you can monitor that as it goes down. Ideally you replace the drive before it gets to zero.

My primary mistake was simply not monitoring that data in an effective way.

I don't think anyone who monitors HDDs has any real expectation that the high-level SMART yes/no is going to protect them from data loss. Instead they look at highly predictive factors like "Reallocated_Sector_Ct" or "Raw_Read_Error_Rate" (or even plain old "Power_On_Hours").

For SSDs it's quite similar: Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Power_On_Hours_and_Msec, Available_Reservd_Space, Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt, Erase_Fail_Count, Workld_Media_Wear_Indic, Media_Wearout_Indicator. Maybe NAND_Writes_1GiB.

NVME SSDs provide SMART-like data on logpage 2 ("Available spare", "Percentage used", "Power on hours"). For some reason the NVME spec does not require media to accept host-initiated self-checks, so most NVMe drives don't have the same functionality as smartctl --test. :-(