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

When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

blog.algolia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 123 posts

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#91

Post by notacoward »

cabirum wrote: post #83

Strange, Samsung 840/850 evo/pro are considered [1][2] among the best consumer SSDs. The issues article mentions do not exist on Windows, the SSDs are very reliable there. I suspect it's not only Samsung fault. Are we sure Linux handling of TRIM operations is absolutely correct? [1] http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experim... [2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb...

The problem is that "absolutely correct" is a slippery concept. Even the most tightly written standard is likely to have some areas of ambiguity through which bugs can creep. If the way that a particular device deals with that ambiguity is known only to those under NDA, then you can have two drivers that are both "absolutely correct" per the standard but only one actually works in all the edge conditions.

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#92

Post by agumonkey »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #90
caf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the loss of reputation really worth less than the value of the externalised testing?

I once was a huge fan of Samsung. But with the EVO disaster and this one, I really regret to have bought one of these.

The EVO was well covered, but these being from the PRO line it's even worse... Intel SSD have been praised for a long time, they seem the only stable brand around.

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#93

Post by sdalfakj »

ploxiln wrote: post #3

Originally TRIM was an un-queued command; all writes had to be flushed, then TRIM executed, then writes could continue. This was bad for performance with automatic on-file-delete trim, so everyone wanted a trim command that could be put in the command queue along with writes. Many new drives have this. It turns out that Samsung 8XX SSDs advertise they support queued trim but it's buggy. The old TRIM command works fin…

Since you seem to be the higher voted and showing on top, could you update your bit about queued stuff with this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724192

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#94

Post by yardie »

Aardwolf wrote: post #73

I'm so sick of this TRIM. Constant configurations needed because of it, constant care like "this thing you better don't do on SSDs". And then problems like this. Do you think there'll ever be SSDs that don't need it?

I remember started incorporating SSDs into their computers and didn't support TRIM. Windows users were telling Mac users their Macs were practically obsolete because it couldn't do this one thing that was enabled for Windows. of course they sent that back to Apple and Apple replied, for years, you don't need it.

Eventually, they relented and enabled it on their SSDs. I'm pretty sure the marketing and engineering butted heads over this one stupid bullet point.

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#95

Post by emodendroket »

jlebar wrote: post #36

To me, this sort of thing brings home the value of not running your own machines. Sure, Amazon's/Google's clouds have quirks, but it's far less likely that you're going to have to debug faulty hardware in this way. It sounds like a team of more than one person worked on this at least part-time for weeks -- how much is that worth? It's not just the cost of hiring extra people to do the work; often small companies simp…

I agree with you. I don't think it makes sense except for very large companies.

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#96

Post by drzaiusapelord »

cabirum wrote: post #83

Strange, Samsung 840/850 evo/pro are considered [1][2] among the best consumer SSDs. The issues article mentions do not exist on Windows, the SSDs are very reliable there. I suspect it's not only Samsung fault. Are we sure Linux handling of TRIM operations is absolutely correct? [1] http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experim... [2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb...

Personally, I find Samsung has a "it boots? Fine then ship," mentality to pretty much all things. Their buggy phones, buggy SSD's, buggy TV's, etc. I wouldn't recommend them, even though they do well on SSD speed tests (which are often gamed by on-board ram caching).

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#97

Post by drzaiusapelord »

pjc50 wrote: post #68
caf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the loss of reputation really worth less than the value of the externalised testing?

Loss of reputation isn't a real thing in this industry. Pretty much all hard drive manufacturers have had high-profile "bad" models, for example.

Only because up until recently getting in the HD game was prohibitively expensive due to the engineering and capital requirements for designing spinning disks. Now anyone can buy some flash media, a pre-cooked controller firmware, combine the two and sell at competitive rates. There are something like five or six competitive SSD makers right now and many more bottom feeders. There are two competitive spinning disk makers and its been that way for decades, ignoring the occasional small third-party player like Hitachi.

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#98

Post by PythonicAlpha »

agumonkey wrote: post #92
PythonicAlpha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once was a huge fan of Samsung. But with the EVO disaster and this one, I really regret to have bought one of these.

The EVO was well covered, but these being from the PRO line it's even worse... Intel SSD have been praised for a long time, they seem the only stable brand around.

Yes, it seems. Still I don't like them much, since they changed to compressing controllers, as much I know, SandForce controllers which have a mixed reputation, as much I remember. But it looks, that Samsung is not better.

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#99

Post by drzaiusapelord »

yardie wrote: post #94
Aardwolf wrote: post #73

I'm so sick of this TRIM. Constant configurations needed because of it, constant care like "this thing you better don't do on SSDs". And then problems like this. Do you think there'll ever be SSDs that don't need it?

I remember started incorporating SSDs into their computers and didn't support TRIM. Windows users were telling Mac users their Macs were practically obsolete because it couldn't do this one thing that was enabled for Windows. of course they sent that back to Apple and Apple replied, for years, you don't need it. Eventually, they relented and enabled it on their SSDs. I'm pretty sure the marketing and engineering butt…

Except without TRIM you'll fill all your blocks and kill performance of your fancy $1500 Apple when the SSD is performing a dozen operations to create a space to perform writes instead of one operation on a properly TRIM'd drive.

Apple didn't do this because of "windows users whining" but because they knew they didn't want an angry mob of customers wondering why their drive is 10x slower than it was on day one.

Arguably, idle GC was "good enough," for some use cases but probably not for drives that aren't sitting idle all the time and on many hours a day. Even then, Apple probably didn't want to tell its customers "let it sit out overnight" to regain performance when supporting plain-jane TRIM was a trivial addition.

On-board GC + OS-driven TRIM are considered the optimal solution for SSD's.

Re: When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid

#100

Post by protomyth »

pjc50 wrote: post #80
vidarh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real enough thing that the IBM DeathStar incident [1] [2] was a large factor in making IBM exit the harddisk market (sold off to Hitachi) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar [2] http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html

But they're still in business making hard drives, under the DeskStar name. Seagate had a round of failures at one point. I'm sure there are people out there who've sworn off WD as well.

Is Seagate back to being good? We had 100 drive failures in a batch of 120 HP netbooks, and we had a large number of our server drives go down the tube. I switched to WD at that point.
Post reply on HN