Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are never going to guess how long the HN SSDs were in the servers... never ever... OK... I'll tell you: 4.5years. I am not even kidding.
How many other customers will/have hit this?
HN is up again
361–370 of 390 posts
Re: HN is up again
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible. It's not even improbable if the disks are the same kind purchased at the same time.
Yep: if you buy a pair disks together, there's a fair chance they'll both be from the same manufacturing batch, which correlates with disk defects.
Re: HN is up again
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are never going to guess how long the HN SSDs were in the servers... never ever... OK... I'll tell you: 4.5years. I am not even kidding.
It's concerning that a hosting company was unaware of the 40,000 hour situation with SSD it was deploying. Anyone in hosting would have been made aware of this, or at least should have kept a better grip on happenings in the market.
Re: HN is up again
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's concerning that a hosting company was unaware of the 40,000 hour situation with SSD it was deploying. Anyone in hosting would have been made aware of this, or at least should have kept a better grip on happenings in the market.
Yeah, this is why you run all equipment in a test environment for 4.5 years before deploying it to prod. Really basic stuff.
Re: HN is up again
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. It's possible that you have nailed this. Edit: here's why I like this theory. I don't believe that the two disks had similar levels of wear, because the primary server would get more writes than the standby, and we switched between the two so rarely. The idea that they would have failed within hours of each other because of wear doesn't seem plausible. But the two servers were set up at the same time , and it's…
This morning, I googled for issues with the firmware and the model of SSD, I got nothing. But now I am searching for "40000 hours SSD" and a million relevant results. Of course, why would I search for 40000 hours. This thread is making me feel a lot less crazy.
This one is just ... maddening.
Re: HN is up again
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of thing is why I love Hacker News. Someone runs into a strange technical situation, and someone else happens to share their own obscure, related anecdote, which just happens to precisely solve the mystery. Really cool to see it benefit HN itself this time.
It's also an example of the dharma of /newest – the rising and falling away of stories that get no attention: HPE releases urgent fix to stop enterprise SSDs conking out at 40K hours - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706968 - March 2020 (0 comments) HPE SSD flaw will brick hardware after 40k hours - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697758 - March 2020 (0 comments) Some HP Enterprise SSD will brick after…
Re: HN is up again
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me narrow my guess: They hit 4 years, 206 days and 16 hours . . . or 40,000 hours. And that they were sold by HP or Dell, and manufactured by SanDisk. Do I win a prize? (None of us win prizes on this one).
I wonder if it might be closer to 40,032 hours. The official Dell wording [1] is "after approximately 40,000 hours of usage". 2^57 nanoseconds is 40031.996687737745 hours. Not sure what's special about 57, but a power of 2 limit for a counter makes sense. That time might include some manufacturer testing too. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/f5k95v/dell_emc_u...
Re: HN is up again
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes total sense but I've never heard of it. Is there any literature or writing about this phenomenon? I guess proper redundancy is having different brands of equipment also in some cases.
Not sure about literature but that was a known thing in the Ops circles I was in 10 years ago: never use the same brand for disk pairs, to minimize wear-and-tear related defects from arising at the same time.
Re: HN is up again
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of thing is why I love Hacker News. Someone runs into a strange technical situation, and someone else happens to share their own obscure, related anecdote, which just happens to precisely solve the mystery. Really cool to see it benefit HN itself this time.
It's also an example of the dharma of /newest – the rising and falling away of stories that get no attention: HPE releases urgent fix to stop enterprise SSDs conking out at 40K hours - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706968 - March 2020 (0 comments) HPE SSD flaw will brick hardware after 40k hours - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697758 - March 2020 (0 comments) Some HP Enterprise SSD will brick after…
Re: HN is up again
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it might be closer to 40,032 hours. The official Dell wording [1] is "after approximately 40,000 hours of usage". 2^57 nanoseconds is 40031.996687737745 hours. Not sure what's special about 57, but a power of 2 limit for a counter makes sense. That time might include some manufacturer testing too. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/f5k95v/dell_emc_u...
See! People should register via mail for those important notifications! (Or alternatively do quarterly checks that your firmware is up to date).
Then the people under them who do give a shit, because they depend on those servers, aren’t allowed to register with HP etc for updates, or to apply firmware updates, because “separation of duties”.
Basically, IT is cancer from the head down.