191–200 of 258 posts
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You still get paid a lot more working at google working on generic backend protobuf shuffling than you will working on SSD firmware at a hardware company or intel's C++ compiler.
For those doubting you, the going rate for embedded engineers out here in the Denver area where a lot of these SSD controllers are designed is ~$90k. Embedded engineers get peanuts for some reason.
If a line of code is written to run in a customer's browser, then that line of code may be deployed to millions, maybe billions, of customers. But, if an equivalent line of code goes in to firmware for some widget, then you're doing pretty good to get that line in to a million widgets at all, and it's going to take a lot longer too.
"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…
"It feels like the author's main complaint is the frustration of not understanding SSD hardware as well." What is so frustrating about SSDs is how very poorly they compare to previous incarnations of solid state storage. Using Disk-On-Chip and/or IDE-pin-compatible CF cards, I had many, many devices in the field that lasted, mounted read-only, for decades An entire sect of the computing industry came to rely on these…
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I have seen some weird issues with SSDs. I had an OCZ Vertex 2 die on me multiple times, but one thing that stood out most is that after a power cycle or complete system shutdown (note: reboots were just fine) everything I had done last time - install software, update Windows, create files - was gone. The state was reverted to before the time it booted. It was like my computer contained some kind of Reborn chip, exce…
Modern SSDs can have very large DRAM write buffers (8-256MB), this is pretty plausible if it was failing to flush it.
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"It feels like the author's main complaint is the frustration of not understanding SSD hardware as well." What is so frustrating about SSDs is how very poorly they compare to previous incarnations of solid state storage. Using Disk-On-Chip and/or IDE-pin-compatible CF cards, I had many, many devices in the field that lasted, mounted read-only, for decades An entire sect of the computing industry came to rely on these…
On modern MLC/TLC SSDs, read-only mode doesn't really exist. The NAND blocks must be re-programmed after a number of read accesses to mitigate read disturb. If anything, mounting read-only is probably a corner case, stressing the firmware's read disturb mitigation. The tradeoff from worse read disturb characteristics is NAND that is 100x cheaper per GB than in 2000.
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~$90k is now peanuts. Interesting.
That's less than 30k in 1980 dollars. Yeah, that's next to nothing.
I worked on SSD firmware for quite a long time and here is my perspective. Early flash used to fairly reliable with almost minimal error correction. However with increasing density, smaller processes and multi level cells, it has gone progressively less reliable and slower. Here are some of the things that we need to worry about: https://www.flashmemorysummit.com/English/Collaterals/Procee... To compensate for all th…
The point being, the solution to this sort of systemic problem is for more corporations to become worker owned. If the guy writing the SSD algorithms has a say in governance and a cut in the profits they will want to stick around. It's the stable version of startups.
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Let's be honest, the chance of a multi-million dollar payoff for an employee is low regardless. Young entry-level devs are optimistic and also vulnerable to believing a line of bullshit on how much their options might be worth some day. I do agree it is a "higher" chance in web/mobile technology, sort of like how your chance of winning the lottery is "higher" if you buy 10 tickets instead of 1.
You still get paid a lot more working at google working on generic backend protobuf shuffling than you will working on SSD firmware at a hardware company or intel's C++ compiler.
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> skates of magnetic readers flying on a cushion of air above a rapidly rotating disc, with the gap separating a few dozen nanometers, often smaller than the process size in the controller's silicon. Complete aside, the fly-height of a magnetic head is actually fractions of a nanometer (i.e. hundreds of picometers). EDIT: I got this from a talk by Bryan Cantrill[1]. The fly-height is allegedly 0.8 nanometers (800 pic…
This seems implausible at first glance. Even making objects flat at the nanometer scale is quite difficult. When you also introduce movement tolerances (e.g. rotation disk is not perfectly aligned), this seems quite extraordinary. Can you provide some references?
Lapidary flat laps regularly get down to 125nm fineness (that's 200,000 grit) with very little issue.
Did you try to bake it in the oven ("reflow")? Sometimes you can add a few more hours to its life, enough for backing it up.
I've had moderate success with sticking failing HDs in the freezer overnight in hopes of getting it to spin one last time. Never tried baking a drive (ssd or hd), but I have with a red ring'd xbox360 mobo. Sometimes the "low tech" solutions still work.