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SSD Failure Temporarily Halts Linux 3.12 Kernel Work
jones_supa writes "The sudden death of a solid-state drive in Linus Torvalds' main workstation has led to the work on the 3.12 Linux kernel being temporarily suspended. Torvalds has not been able to recover anything from the drive. Subsystem maintainers who have outstanding pull requests may need to re-submit their requests in the coming days. If the SSD isn't recoverable he will finish out the Linux 3.12 merge window from a laptop."
Linux said "So I don't want to necessarily blame the harddisk, since it's just ten
days since I upgraded the rest of my machine, after it worked years in
the previous one. That just makes me go "hmm". As far as I know, all
the fans etc were working fine, but.."
There's his problem: "after it worked years in the previous [machine]."
His SSD died a natural death of old age.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
I've owned several hundred hard drives over the last 30 years. I've never had an active hard drive drive just blank out. I have had drives that had not been powered for a couple of years refuse to ever come back. But if I did not feel the need to even power the thing on for years, you can imagine how little I cared for what was on it.
In the last four years, I've owned around 20 SSDs. I've had five failures. Every single one was the drive just instantly lost everything. Amazingly, in four of the five cases, the drive still worked fine! It had simply lost all the data on it and believed itself to be a blank drive.
That said, the speed of SSDs makes them worth the risk to me. But I take backups far more seriously than I used to. I need them far more often.
Seconded. I've had a RAID1 mirror on my primary workstation at home for roughly... 4 years. I had one of those "oh, drat, my drive is starting to click, and we all know what that means..." moments and barely had time to backup the /home partition to an external machine while I went hardware shopping. Since that event window closed, that configuration has saved my butt twice. One time, the mirrored pair started to go after kinetic shock from moving to a new residence, and it didn't even stress me out to wait for a new pair from my online vendor of choice. I don't know what happened the second time, but I'm guessing that some bad components on the mobo were dirtying the 5V and 3.3V power rails into the drive connector because the whole rig decided to go kaput shortly after in a way that forced an upgrade to the latest CPU socket du jour mobo. Thankfully, I was already budgeting for new guts for that rig due to performance demands.
I'm not nearly as much of a believer in RAID for the home environment. If you (accidentally) delete something on one drive it's gone from both. Better to buy two drives and do a daily rsync. That way you have a window of opportunity to recover data. Personally, I use rsync without --delete until the 2d drive starts getting full, then I use the --delete flag to clean up.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
trying to desolder 100 pins spaced 0.01" apart then resoldering them, unless you have a 0.1 mill precision soldering robot it is impossible, you can't even buy wire thin enough to do it by hand.
SMT rework by hand isint rocket science, but takes more tools than the average garage has.
Desoldering you use a custom tip for that socket/package type (one tip per package & they're not cheap). It's essentially a metal ring that heats the solder on all the pins at once. In the center of the assembly is a vacuum probe. You heat all the pins, melting all the solder & hit the button on the handpiece to suction the chip up off the board. Then clean up the pads on the board. Careful with the heat because you dont want to lift pads off the board, if you do then you have to either fix them, or make a new pads. And then if you manage to trash a via (conductivity path to a different board layer), then you've got to drill out a new one and you have to use a esd safe conductive drill with a resistance cutoff. You put a clip from the drill in contact with the layer you're trying to get to, drill down and when the drill tip makes contact with that layer the drill turns off because the circuit is complete. But it still sucks and if you don't know how all the board layers are put together you may end up trashing a trace a couple layers into the board and wrecking the whole thing.
Soldering it down you do this. Align all the chip legs on the pads. Then you can either run a small bead of solder paste across all the pins or use a wave soldering tip (small cup, uses surface tension to hold the solder in place) and drag the tip over all the pins. Heat on the pin & pad draws the solder down into the joints. If you put too much solder you might have to vac it back up and redo it if you've made bridges etc. Alignment is key, and keeping the part in position is key. I used to try and avoid using glue underneath because that made it difficult to get it back off if you needed to down the road.
Doing hand rework on that kind of stuff the hardest thing for me was dealing with smt chip caps, little bastards will crack if you heat em to fast, so you have to get a temp regulated hot plate, heat em up slow, then pick and place em quick with tweezers/needlenose & solder em down quick.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
You have a software feature in a server OS that supports certain client OSes to do backups to the server. RAID may be a software feature, but even if it's "software raid", you often have BIOS bootable raids that even work with one of the drives missing. This essentially means that you can work OS agnostic on a lower level than "I have a backup system that works". For Linux, you can have a backup system too that will restore from a LiveCD/USB stick and stores on a remote server. The same amount of time roughly will be needed to backup and restore, differential, incremental, full backups, the works. The solution you are providing is really nothing comparable to RAID. It's fundamentally different because it works on a totally different layer, doesn't prevent downtime and it's not OS agnostic. RAID should prevent downtime, making working backups should prevent data loss. Maybe WHS is the shizniz, you rock for making actual backups, but other than that, your post is totally offtopic in this context and doesn't even begin to solve a problem that Linus was facing with his desktop.
I'm not modding you down, even though I have mod-points, but I'm telling you exactly why I think you shouldn't have posted this. I hope you learned something from it and in the future will implement both backups and RAID when unscheduled downtime is important. Maybe you would even implement a system that works for all relevant OSes in the environment you have to do it for, without relying on a single vendor that offers a closed source product. It's a risk that means you'll have to support their product and licencing and other requirements until the data isn't relevant anymore, even after you have migrated to a competing product.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Linus Torvalds himself is a single point of failure... People who rely on Linux being updated in a timely manner should figure out what the probability of him dying is or suffering a debilitating stroke. Then, calculate if it's worth bribing him not to take part in risky activities, pay for a safer car, etc.