On 18/12/2020 12:20, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 18/12/2020 10:57, Pancho wrote:
>> On 18/12/2020 00:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>> On 17/12/2020 20:32, bob prohaska wrote:
>>>>   SMART keeps some track of deterioration
>>>> in mechanical drives, does it exist for SSDs?
>>>
>>> Absolutely. It's mandatory more or less. It gives you error rates on
>>> all the things you need to worry about. This drive has been going a
>>> shade over 5 years of actual 'on' time as my linux desk top boot
>>> drive: data is held on a server so it doesn't get much action. But
>>> logs are written to this. So it has in fact more writes than reads!
>>> (9780 GB versus 5255GB)
>>> It still reports 95% of its useful life left.
>>>
>>> ============================================
>>>
>>> I've just tested my first SSD, which is still in use. An 11 year old
>> Intel X25-E SSDs 32GB:
>>
>>      Power_On_Hours 54141
>>      Media_Wearout_Indicator 98.
>>
>> Although to be fair I'm not sure all SSDs are as reliable. I did buy a
>> number of OCZ SSDs (about 4), all of which failed catastrophically,
>> I'm not sure what the wearout indicator was on them.
>
> I think the consensus seems to be that a reliable brand will these days
> outlast spinning rust, and given that unless you have a CPU/DRAM
> failure, that happens is blocks go bad and are mapped out which is a
> very graceful failure mode.
>
> So provided you check with SMART once a year you should not have
> *catastrophic* failure. My  failure was pretty hard and happened in less
> than a year.
>
>
>
You are describing a graceful/designed failure mode. As I remember it,
my OCZ failure mode was that the device just failed to be recognised by
BIOS, i.e. not blocks wearing out gracefully. I don't think anything
showed up on SMART. By the time these disks failed they had been
relegated to bin-able laptop boot drives, no important data, so I didn't
investigate. My assumption is that a component in the controller board
failed. But the effect was a sudden total loss of all data on the disk.

These OCZ drives were bought circa 2013. I've not had problems with any
of my other SSDs Intel, Crucial, Kingston, Samsung.

However, I think it is one of those questions were the diagnosis is
irrelevant, we all know the correct treatment: good short term backups.

I've using rsnapshot recently, which I have found great, simple enough
for an incompetent like myself.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05