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SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

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Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#241

Post by mst »

lostlogin wrote: post #220
mst wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deathstars were fantastic, they almost always failed on the outer edges of the platters. So if you only formatted them (filesystem wise) out to capacity-2Gb they were a really cheap option at the time.

That’s a very different definition of fantastic than the one I use.

Once I'd worked it out - which was after the problems were public and therefore the price had utterly cratered - they were by far the cheapest storage per Gb available at the time (think "by a factor of two").

I would not have let a normal business user near one, but the developers I was supporting were most pleased about their larger than expected scratch disks for test databases and intermediate compilation artifacts.

Everything breaks. Things that at least break predictably make me happier than the alternative.

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#242

Post by mst »

xpe wrote: post #218
mst wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick a manufacturer and you'll be able to find plenty of horror stories. Some may be worse than others but diversification is the right answer anyway.

But how do you color match your drives in your spiffy NAS? This is why my bicycle drivetrain should be a frankenstein combination of parts from different manufacturers? /s

I hate absolutely everything about this comment.

If we're ever both at the same conference show me a link to this and I'll buy the first round.

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#243

Post by no-s »

kqr wrote: post #213
dredmorbius wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I don't know how long you've been in the business, but the change seems a relatively recent one, one that wasn't manifestly obvious to me, and one that has pretty much always seemed difficult to communicate to management. Whether that's because business management is often about ignoring risks or treating it as inconvenient, or if I've just had a long string of bad bosses, I'm not sure. I did make a point of…

You know what? You're right again! The stuff I've read that touches on this idea is almost all from 2006 and onwards, mainly 2010s. The earliest example is a bit of an outlier: Douglas Hubbard's 1985 How to Measure Anything -- but it's also only tangentially related. The other real exceptions are books on statistics (where the idea of risk management -- at least in my collection -- seems to have gotten popular in the…

> The stuff I've read that touches on this idea is almost all from 2006 and onwards, mainly 2010s. The earliest example is a bit of an outlier: Douglas Hubbard's 1985 How to Measure Anything -- but it's also only tangentially related.

I didn’t keep good track of such things but a lot of my early reading in the 70’s was in operations research and decision support systems, mostly sort of what we call operational analytics these days with a big helping of statistical process control too. World War 2 logistics practices and ‘50s and ‘60s “scientific management” fads generated a lot of material, some insightful. Many medium-sized businesses could afford significant R&D then, so you’ll find e.g. furniture factories developing their own computer systems from PCBs to custom ASIC components, just to manage statistical process control and decision support systems.

> That said, I did mention it was obvious to me. I still find it hard to convince management and colleagues of its importance...

I think the reason I keep having to justify this every few years is the tendency towards abstractions in management which try to simplify things into “anecdotal analytics”, e.g. preferring a persuasive narrative over reality...for a good cynical perspective from the ‘50s I recommend C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons>).

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#245

Post by no-s »

xpe wrote: post #218
mst wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick a manufacturer and you'll be able to find plenty of horror stories. Some may be worse than others but diversification is the right answer anyway.

But how do you color match your drives in your spiffy NAS? This is why my bicycle drivetrain should be a frankenstein combination of parts from different manufacturers? /s

> But how do you color match your drives in your spiffy NAS?

haha, pimp your ride!

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#246

Post by Hamuko »

loxias wrote: post #176
cyphar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution is to use a different manufacturer for each drive in a mirror. The prices are usually pretty similar and you get to make sure that one firmware bug doesn't kill your entire pool.

This is the way. For even more peace of mind, (and only when you can afford it, obviously) try decoupling your disk purchases a bit from when you're going to need them. When you see a good price or a sale on a particular disk, grab it add it to your own personal "prebought disk pool". When it's time to either replace a disk or spin up a whole new array, now you have the benefit of diversification across time .

My current procedure is to keep an external drive for backups and if any of the drives in my RAID fails, I'll just shuck the external and stick it in the RAID. The advantage is that the drive is already known to be good through running badblocks (which takes like a week to run), and I don't need to wait for a week for the Amazon man to get here. Disadvantage is that I need to recreate my backup from the start, which loses out my version history, or restore it from an online copy, which is slow and cumbersome.

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#247

Post by TaylorAlexander »

barry-cotter wrote: post #165
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barry I appreciate that you recognize my good faith efforts. But I want to highlight that queer and gender nonconforming people are regularly marginalized and othered in this country and around the world. It is genuinely tiring to them to be dismissed regularly in their daily life and then to encounter people online who want to play this up as some culture war with two legitimate sides. I personally would not label y…

Quoted post unavailable.

Barry I’m just being honest. If you don’t change your behavior you can expect more of the same. Whether it’s being downvoted or being accused of being a jerk, I can see there is something about this that bothers you.

But let’s stay focused. Would you be willing to watch one or both videos I posted? Or no? There’s a lot of people out there that could benefit from your understanding, and all it would take is a few minutes of your time. Please consider it. I’d appreciate it too. Thanks.

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#248

Post by lucb1e »

synergy20 wrote: post #88
lucb1e wrote: post #28

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

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 055 055 000 Old_age Always - 39676 I'm 300 hours from 40K, time to buy new SSD? is this real?!

0. Have backups

1. Check your backups

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#249

Post by lucb1e »

climb_stealth wrote: post #219
lucb1e wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The -a flag from my example should be an alias for --all (man smartctl | grep -A1 ' -a' | head -2). Is that not the case in your version?

Pro tip: when writing out commands for people to read it helps to use the long form arguments. In this case passing '--all' instead of '-a' to smartctl. It makes it easier to read and more clear what specific options do. Same with calling things in scripts. Short form is for quick and dirty typing things, but not great for reading or comprehension :)

Fair point, yes, I should have done that!

Re: SSD will fail at 40k power-on hours (2021)

#250

Post by rasz »

oogali wrote: post #127
Group_B wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It usually takes something really bad happening before things get better.

Absolute best mechanical drives available until quite recently can be traced back to Deatstar. Deskstar 7K4000 were absolute best in class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

Hitachi bought IBM hard drive business in 2003 for $2B. Sadly Its now owned by WD.

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