On 18/12/2020 13:14, Pancho wrote:
> 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.
>
Yes, that was very similar to my failure. but it happened slowly enough
to enable me to get SMART readings which indicated some sort of failure
to talk to the SATA bus rather than damage to the NAND flash.


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

Mine failed around 2018 I think. It was a regular branded Kingston SSD
Its been replaced with an (apparently) identical unit which is still
working fine.

The point I wanted to make, is, that ex of this sort of failure which
isn't SSD specific, SSD technology now appears to be more reliable than
spinning rust.

>
> 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.
>
All my irreplaceable data is rsynced overnight. Handy when I
accidentally delete something - last night's backup is still there.


--
Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that
doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that
don't protect,  masquerading as public servants who don't serve the public.

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