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Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

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Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#11

Post by hanikesn »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #8
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

"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…

Well to be fair, there is an entire layer of abstraction at the SSD controller level that does tons of black box magic. It allows the OS to treat the SSD as another other storage device without letting the OS know what is going on. So the combination of non-moving parts (making it hard/impossible to debug via physical inspection) combined with a tons of wear leveling/misc magic can defo make it seem like SSD's are ma…

The exact same thing happens hard drives. There's a ton of magic going on.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#12

Post by pmden »

"We had one SSD fail in this way and then come back when it was pulled out and reinserted, apparently perfectly healthy, which doesn't inspire confidence."

We've experienced exactly the same thing. Our general course of action is to perform a hard power cycle of the server through IPMI - a warm cycle doesn't seem to work. I've always presumed it was down to dodgy SSD controller firmware given the way it suddenly stops appearing in the output of fdisk -l.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#13

Post by gpvos »

Waterluvian wrote: post #5

"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…

> Why can't we come up with an understanding of why it fails?

Indeed, that is the question that the article's author seems to be asking.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#14

Post by NikolaeVarius »

hanikesn wrote: post #11
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to be fair, there is an entire layer of abstraction at the SSD controller level that does tons of black box magic. It allows the OS to treat the SSD as another other storage device without letting the OS know what is going on. So the combination of non-moving parts (making it hard/impossible to debug via physical inspection) combined with a tons of wear leveling/misc magic can defo make it seem like SSD's are ma…

The exact same thing happens hard drives. There's a ton of magic going on.

Lots of extra magic happens in an SSD though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5JoC4-qsO0 https://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Solid_State_Drive_(SSD)_F...

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#15

Post by gruez »

pythonpatrol wrote: post #7
Severian wrote: post #4

Call me crazy, but I don't think that a Crucial MX300 is the best choice for an enterprise worthy ZFS drive. I get what the author is concerned about, but I wouldn't be that surprised that a consumer level SSD failed in what sounds like a heavily used fileserver.

Crucial? I can tell you most of them got spectek's chips inside, no wonder why they fail.

what's wrong with spectek chips?

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#16

Post by gpvos »

hanikesn wrote: post #11
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to be fair, there is an entire layer of abstraction at the SSD controller level that does tons of black box magic. It allows the OS to treat the SSD as another other storage device without letting the OS know what is going on. So the combination of non-moving parts (making it hard/impossible to debug via physical inspection) combined with a tons of wear leveling/misc magic can defo make it seem like SSD's are ma…

The exact same thing happens hard drives. There's a ton of magic going on.

Yes, but most technical people seem to have a mental model that explains most failures pretty well. Not so for SSDs, apparently.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#18

Post by Wowfunhappy »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #8
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

"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…

Well to be fair, there is an entire layer of abstraction at the SSD controller level that does tons of black box magic. It allows the OS to treat the SSD as another other storage device without letting the OS know what is going on. So the combination of non-moving parts (making it hard/impossible to debug via physical inspection) combined with a tons of wear leveling/misc magic can defo make it seem like SSD's are ma…

Is there a good reason why we use separate SSD controllers instead of letting the primary cpu handle it? The obvious reason is backwards compatibility, but as more of computing moves to SSDs, is this still relevant?

ZFS has shown that removing layers of abstraction with regard to storage can be beneficial.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#19

Post by Severian »

gpvos wrote: post #13
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

"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…

> Why can't we come up with an understanding of why it fails? Indeed, that is the question that the article's author seems to be asking.

Well, considering it's the cheapest consumer SSD they could afford, and then connecting it to a SAS port might be a whole story in itself.

Re: Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us

#20

Post by Kye »

shittyadmin wrote: post #2

I've experienced a few seriously strange issues with modern SSDs, even some of the better ones. I had a 512GB Samsung drive that became very slow randomly at doing IO operations, the whole machine would die for 10-30 seconds at a time once or twice a day while any process that tried to use the disk became blocked on IO. Then it'd come right back like everything was perfectly fine. Issues like this definitely worry me…

If the Bitlocker hardware encryption fiasco is any clue, the people who make SSDs don't know what's going on inside either.
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