Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SSD Write Endurance Considered Sufficient

ef.gy

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–34 of 34 posts

Re: SSD Write Endurance Considered Sufficient

#31

Post by jws »

pasbesoin wrote: post #22
jws wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not like magnetic is necessarily immune. WD greens used to have astoundingly bad spin down logic. I killed a bunch of them with default Linux settings and near idle servers in about that time frame.

I have a Scorpio Blue that parked its heads incessantly until I deployed a utility to force better ACPI settings. Not write endurance, per se. But you only get to park the heads so many times, on average...

Yeah, statistics work. I had greens fail at 30k parks and survive over 1M parks. 300k was the published number for parks. I think they screwed up by allowing the firmware to thrash them to death, but I think they got the 300k number right.

Re: SSD Write Endurance Considered Sufficient

#32

Post by pasbesoin »

jws wrote: post #31
pasbesoin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Scorpio Blue that parked its heads incessantly until I deployed a utility to force better ACPI settings. Not write endurance, per se. But you only get to park the heads so many times, on average...

Yeah, statistics work. I had greens fail at 30k parks and survive over 1M parks. 300k was the published number for parks. I think they screwed up by allowing the firmware to thrash them to death, but I think they got the 300k number right.

Do you have any concrete/verified descriptions of the firmware problems? I ran across plenty of people commenting on the problem, and my own intuition (or deduction, based on listening to the "click... click... click..." and eventually noting the escalating number of parks reported) plus the fix that worked for me strengthened this intuition. But I never saw a documented analysis let alone an admission on WD's part. (Admittedly, I may have missed one or both.)

Re: SSD Write Endurance Considered Sufficient

#33

Post by lbraasch »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #27
lbraasch wrote: post #6

tl;dr I'm guilty of the SSD fear. My first Intel (320) drive was meticulously maintained in fear of shortened life span and performance losses. I went so far as to question every file copied to the drive vs. mounting an external HDD. The thing bricked itself due to a firmware bug in less than 12 months. Using a Samsung drive now. I don't think about read/writes anymore. I just use the darn thing.

The 320 had a brickable fw bug? I have 5-10 or so in production and have no issues. Maybe mine have a newer FW. I always update them when I give them out.

It's pretty well documented. The supposed firmware fix doesn't fix the issue [1]

This drive came with my x220 (160gb), shipped March 2012. I have a second Intel 320 (120gb) which is older, and hasn't exhibited issue. Lenovo replaced the 160gb 320 under warranty. I opted to go with a 256gb Samsung 840 pro. The 320's are now external drives.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4646/intel-ssd-320-firmware-po...

Re: SSD Write Endurance Considered Sufficient

#34

Post by threedaymonk »

ryanklee wrote: post #13
threedaymonk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing bricked itself due to a firmware bug in less than 12 months. Was it an OCZ, by any chance? The exact same thing happened to me. I scrupulously avoided unnecessary wear, disabled swap (though I've been disabling swap for years), mounted /tmp on a RAM disk, and the accurs't thing killed itself stone dead waking from sleep due to a firmware bug. I also replaced it with a Samsung, as it happens.

> My first Intel (320) drive

Oh, that's embarrassing! I read that, but somehow convinced myself that it was part of another comment.
Post reply on HN