81–90 of 243 posts
Apparently a few months ago it became known on the Chinese internet that the 980 Pro, 970 Evo Plus with new controller, and OEM versions are prone to getting unreadable sectors, where SMART 'Media and Data Integrity Errors' increases on every read attempt. https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/x82mwe/samsung_ss... https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/x8arle/psa_sam... How I came across this: Ran into th…
Funny thing. This article prompted me to check the health of my two Samsung SSD's (a 250GB 850 EVO SATA III, and a 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe), which were fine. But Samsung's Magician also listed my Seagate ST2000DM008-2FR102 2TB spinny disk. It found a SMART error. I ran a performance test and looked at SMART again, and the "Hardware ECC Recovered" value went from 80 to 81, with a threshold of 64. My other software label…
The real problem is OS:es that write to disk for no good reason. Windows 10 writes 100KB/s constantly. That should be illegal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lifetime warranties used to be commonplace, I wish we could return to those times, or at least to a time of repairability.
Lifetime warranty on a consumable product (SSDs have a limited number of writes) doesn't seem reasonable.
And even still, you could construct the controller so that it was burning e-fuses to indicate lifespan and the fuses could be readable through JTAG, short of complete controller death or lightning-strike level surges (which you can legitimately argue as being abuse and not warrantyable) you could make it offline-readable from an external device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse
The problems here are primarily economic/social, not technical. Companies don't want to hold warranty liability on their books for 10+ years, but they also don't really want to accept returns for defective products or other things either, and we make them do it anyway.
The EU is already pushing warranties to a minimum of two years for exactly this reason. Could it be 5 years, or 10 years? Sure, why not.
Companies will scream in the short term, of course. It's cheaper for them to push out crap that'll die and be in the trash in 3 years. Engineering products for longer lifespans would be a shift in engineering/design mindset. It probably would also push minimum device costs upwards at least a little bit, but, that's not a bad thing either - the slogan is "reduce, reuse, recycle", in that order, and "reduce" there means simply buy less or buy things that last longer. A shift away from planned obsolescence isn't the worst thing culturally, we don't want to encourage design-for-disposability.
Especially as Moore's Law slows, hardware is relevant for longer and longer periods of time. For example, a lot of people are finding that their GPUs are dying before they're actually irrelevant as hardware. It's not just NVIDIA who had bumpgate, a ton of hardware from that era failed over time due to faulty solder and probably could have been fixed with an hour of a tech's work.
Even worse, they're often dropped from support. There's really nothing wrong with a R9 290X as a GPU, but AMD won't support it with software anymore, despite the fact that it basically works anyway and it's pretty much purely a software lockout (which third parties have hacked and bypassed), because they want you to buy the new one. Wouldn't it be nice if GPUs were just expected to work for 10 years from purchase and that was covered by warranty and software support?
There are an increasing number of people who do hang onto hardware for 5-10 years because the relevant lifespan is getting longer and longer, and we should encourage that and require companies to support those consumption patterns. Just like not gluing together phones to make the battery irreplaceable, we really should be making sure electronics bumpouts don't fail in 3-5 years and that companies don't dump-and-run on the software.
Routers are another one where the software support is just egregious, too. How many rando Linksys or TP-Link or whatever actually get an update when a bunch of new vulnerabilities in WPA or whatever are discovered? Not that many, and "just install OpenWRT" is not a society-level answer especially when companies are locking down hardware.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/69f2c9346313ba3d3dfa4...
Can be a bit eye opening to look down that and see equipment you're using listed. ;)
I've been trying to find a decent endurance NVME in the m.2 form factor for write-heavy applications and it appears that true 2-bit MLC has all but disappeared, replaced by 3-bit TLC and higher (with commensurate loss of endurance) The high endurance SSDs appear to be only available in u.2\u.3\hhhl and god-help-me EDSFF form factors Any suggestions? Micron's 7450 isn't readily available
Funny thing. This article prompted me to check the health of my two Samsung SSD's (a 250GB 850 EVO SATA III, and a 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe), which were fine. But Samsung's Magician also listed my Seagate ST2000DM008-2FR102 2TB spinny disk. It found a SMART error. I ran a performance test and looked at SMART again, and the "Hardware ECC Recovered" value went from 80 to 81, with a threshold of 64. My other software label…
How do I check health of a Samsung SSD on Linux?
I wish more independent review organizations would conduct destructive "write lifespan until ultimate failure" real world tests on SSDs. With a mixture of real world large contiguous files and small random writes. Real ultimate write lifespan on 3-level-cell and QLC consumer grade SSDs varies wildly for things of the same capacity and similar price. Such as this series of tests from 7 years ago: https://techreport.co…
The official line is that endurance should not matter for most people. For example the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB is rated for 2400TB TBW - which, if the drive has a service of 5 years, is 1.3TB of data written per day. The average user will need Where that falls down though of course is cases like this. The point of a review is to show when real-world performance doesn't match the marketing. Tech reviewers seem to be blindly trusting the marketing on this one. They're really dropping the ball.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also used to be the case that a computer was basically ewaste within two or three years because a new one would be ten times faster.
Growing up poor, I was always a few generations behind, rocking a 486 DX2 when the PII & PIII where the latest and greatest. 33kbps modem when others had 56k. When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.
I miss that too. Thrift stores suck now, they're pulling all the good clothes out and selling them to upcyclers and pulling all the cool electronics and cameras and other stuff and selling them on ShopGoodwill and ebay.
And ShopGoodwill is pretty absurd, almost everything is sold as-is and uninspected, and prices are just as high as ebay if not sometimes higher.
The days of wandering through a goodwill and finding some neat stuff at a bargain price are gone now, unfortunately.
My 980 2TB crossed the river styx over the holiday break. Failure mode exactly as described. Nice Christmas present for me. Took 3 weeks to get the warranty replacement from Samsung.