201–210 of 276 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not two SSDs, four : two in the main server, and two in the backup server.
Yowch. The old "stagger your drive replacements, stagger your batches" thing might not be quite as outdated as we'd like to think...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I decided to employ this tactic when I was setting up my new NAS and needed two drives. Upside was that I could definitely know they weren't from the same batch. Downside was that I had to buy a Seagate, and I don't have good experiences with Seagate since my only Seagate drive had died an early death at the tender age of 3. Turns out that this was very much a downside since the Seagate drive died at the tender age o…
I had a series of WD drives that failed, and I managed to get them all replaced under warranty since they died within 3-5 years. I don't buy WD drives anymore but it wasn't the end of the world since I had spares while I waited for the replacement drives to be shipped. Anecdotally, I haven't had issues with Seagate but I'm sure it really boils down to which exact drives you're using and what batch they were in.
Some may be worse than others but diversification is the right answer anyway.
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> I've increasingly come to view systems operations / SRE as a risk management exercise, where the goal is to reduce the odds of a catastrophic failure. s/reduce/find an appropriate level for/ It's a common misconception that risk management and risk reduction are synonyms. Risk management is about finding the right level of risk given external factors. Sometimes that means maintaining the current level of risk or ev…
One of the advantages startups have is higher risk tolerance than branded megacorporations. Data, customers, brand, employees, law suits, or cynically, human lives.
The risk is being managed at the VC/investor level, by diversifying investment bets over numerous early ventures.
The death of any one of those isn't a concern for the VC, if the portfolio performance is sufficient. Of course, for the individual venture and employees, that risk is disaggregated.
More rigorous systems practices are seen as an impediment to early growth with any potential problems either something that can be ironed out later, or simply a post-liquidation concern that doesn't factor into the investors' interests at all.
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If both SSD's are from the same lot number and one fails, the chances of the second failing go up by a high amount. Both failing at the same time though is extremely rare.
We (as an industry) went through this bad batch madness with the IBM DeskStar 75GXP hard drives, which were affectionately referred to as "IBM Deathstar"[1]. It's rare, but it's not _that_ rare. You have to make the effort to understand why it failed. I had a situation where I deployed Toshiba SLC SSDs (that were purchased over the course of several months) and a piece of software that synchronized to disk frequently…
So if you only formatted them (filesystem wise) out to capacity-2Gb they were a really cheap option at the time.
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There is -- it's using words other than those, which is both easy and considerate.
Some of us believe it's a mistake to give mere words that much power.
Check your power-on hours: $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep -e Power_On_Hours -e ^ID ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 9743 Just looking at the raw value, it seems to be 9'743 hours in my case
I seem to have the world's oldest SSD (or am I misinterpreting the output?) (shell 1) ~# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep -e Power_On_Hours -e ^ID ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 9 Power_On_Hours_and_Msec 0x0032 000 000 000 Old_age Always - 933932h+27m+33.940s
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Surprisingly few HN submissions under either term: IBM Deskstar: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... IBM Deathstar: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Back then people still used Slashdot: Wondering if it's real... https://m.slashdot.org/story/20680 Years later, it's a widespread phenomenon: https://m.slashdot.org/story/43312 It was affectionately called the "click of death".
Ah, inventing an opinion to get angry about: some things never change.
Cisco is not a SSD manufacturer. They write industry-wide bug. Does that mean that more than one SSD manufacturer is affected (because they use partially the same firmware)? Further down they mention only Sandisk. Or is the industry-wide just their newspeak for saying any Sandisk of affected model, regardless whether installed in a Cisco box or somewhere else?
So, has anyone opened one of these SSDs and tried to get at the firmware and find out WTAF code was written?