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Why I'm Usually Unnerved When Modern SSDs Die on Us (utoronto.ca)

Chris Siebenmann, a Unix Systems Administrator at University of Toronto, writes about the inability to figure out the bottleneck when an SSD dies: What unnerves me about these sorts of abrupt SSD failures is how inscrutable they are and how I can't construct a story in my head of what went wrong. With spinning HDs, drives might die abruptly but you could at least construct narratives about what could have happened to do that; perhaps the spindle motor drive seized or the drive had some other gross mechanical failure that brought everything to a crashing halt (perhaps literally). SSDs are both solid state and opaque, so I'm left with no story for what went wrong, especially when a drive is young and isn't supposed to have come anywhere near wearing out its flash cells (as this SSD was).

(When a HD died early, you could also imagine undetected manufacturing flaws that finally gave way. With SSDs, at least in theory that shouldn't happen, so early death feels especially alarming. Probably there are potential undetected manufacturing flaws in the flash cells and so on, though.) When I have no story, my thoughts turn to unnerving possibilities, like that the drive was lying to us about how healthy it was in SMART data and that it was actually running through spare flash capacity and then just ran out, or that it had a firmware flaw that we triggered that bricked it in some way.

4 of 358 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Heading should be by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Waterboarding?

  2. Re:With spinning disks, you do not know either by ctilsie242 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Could be worse. At a previous job, I've had someone demand "7200 RPM SSDs", and no amount of explaining could change the person's mind.

  3. Re:With spinning disks, you do not know either by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Funny

    That is why I always stick to real to real 9 track paper tape. If you can't see the bits you just can't trust it.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  4. Re:With spinning disks, you do not know either by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Funny

    Tell this person you could only find 7199 RPM SSDs, but if they spin in an office chair while using the system it will make up the difference.