Ask Slashdot: How Do SSDs Die?

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Ask Slashdot: How Do SSDs Die?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @04:20AM from the whimpery-bang dept.

First time accepted submitter kfsone writes "I've experienced, first-hand, some of the ways in which spindle disks die, but either I've yet to see an SSD die or I'm not looking in the right places. Most of my admin-type friends have theories on how an SSD dies but admit none of them has actually seen commercial grade drives die or deteriorate. In particular, the failure process seems like it should be more clinical than spindle drives. If you have X many of the same SSD drive and none of them suffer manufacturing defects, if you repeat the same series of operations on them they should all die around the same time. If that's correct, then what happens to SSDs in RAID? Either all your drives will start to fail together or at some point, your drives will become out of sync in-terms of volume sizing. So, have you had to deliberately EOL corporate grade SSDs? Do they die with dignity or go out with a bang?"

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How do SSD's die by AwesomeMcgee · 2012-10-16 04:26 · Score: 5, Funny

Screaming in agony, hissing bits and bleeding jumperless in the night
Re:Die! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-16 04:27 · Score: 5, Funny

Wow - you've been here a long long time then
Oblig: T. S. Eliot by stevegee58 · 2012-10-16 04:43 · Score: 4, Funny

Not with a bang but a whimper.
Re:Bang! by ColdWetDog · 2012-10-16 04:48 · Score: 5, Funny

Does anyone else find this sort of thing upsetting? I grew up during that period of time when tech failed dramatically on TV and in movies. Sparks, flames, explosions - crew running around randomly spraying everything with fire extinguishers. Klaxons going off. Orders given and received. Damage control reports.
None of this 'oh snap, the hard drive died'.
Personally, I think the HD (and motherboard) manufacturers ought to climb back on the horse. Make failure modes exciting again. Give us a run for the money. It can't be hard - there still must be plenty of bad electrolytic capacitors out there.
How about a little love?

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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Re:CRC Errors by lytles · 2012-10-16 05:40 · Score: 5, Funny

power corrupts. absolute power corrupts absolutely

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My blog
Re:CRC Errors by Mattcelt · 2012-10-16 05:44 · Score: 5, Funny

And a lack of power enables corruption. QED
Re:Umm by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-16 05:54 · Score: 1, Funny

Scotty is your best friend in the Enterprise.
FTFY
Re:Umm... by daha · 2012-10-16 06:22 · Score: 3, Funny

That is why one uses RAID 6 with lower tier drives and hot spares.
Works great until 3 drives in the RAID fail.
Better make it a RAID-60 just to be safe. And maybe mirror that too.