[HN Gopher] How to estimate an SSD's working life
___________________________________________________________________
How to estimate an SSD's working life
Author : ingve
Score : 177 points
Date : 2022-12-05 07:57 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eclecticlight.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (eclecticlight.co)
| petercooper wrote:
| For some reason I was obsessed with this topic for a few hours
| once and ended up finding this YouTube video where someone
| basically did the experiment I was considering doing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHpSIBpvU0A .. hammering at some
| old SSDs non-stop to see how quickly he could break them.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Did the question about Apple's new laptops and their apparently
| high writes in general usage get resolved? And was it
| incorrect/misleading reporting, or somehow not a problem (life of
| SSD still likely to be 'long enough') or is it still potentially
| the case that the machines will be 'bricked' due to the non-
| replaceable SSD dying early?
|
| I don't mind having to have the SSD replaced by Apple if the cost
| is reasonable, just as I do with batteries, but would be good to
| know what to expect.
| drooopy wrote:
| According to the guy behind Asahi Linux, there was no
| misreporting. It was an actual bug and those excessive write
| operations happened.
| https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1396374313591140357?ref_...
|
| While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see the
| benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on
| my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.
|
| But an SSD that's glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits
| that I can think of and basically only serves to give any
| computer a hard coded expiration date. And thinness is not an
| excuse. There are computers as thin as the Air that have
| removable storage drives.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but how does non-modular RAM
| improve performance?
| javchz wrote:
| Less Physical Distance should create less latency, plus an
| optimized profile for one list of model of banks vs the
| diversity in the modula industry with different clock
| speeds and latencies.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower
| latency makes any real life difference?
|
| And why would the laptops suddenly ship with a variety of
| modules if they're replaceable? You can still ship it
| with the same modules in every laptop and get those
| benefits. And if someone upgrades it, that's still an
| improvement over no upgrade path, so this makes no sense
| to me.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower
| latency makes any real life difference?
|
| Yes, compare the specs of DDR4 and DDR5 to LPDDR4X and
| LPDDR5X. The latter are significantly higher performance.
|
| This is also the reason that Dell recently introduced
| CAMM memory modules -- it is an attempt to address the
| packaging bottleneck that is limiting the speed of DIMMs
| currently.
|
| The amount of time that it takes a signal to go down a
| wire has been relevant for DRAM for a while now. If you
| look at the traces on the board of any relatively modern
| computer, you'll see some that take circuitous routes,
| for the purpose of having the signals arrive at the CPU
| at the same time. You can see this even on relatively low
| performance devices like a Raspberry Pi. https://www.cnx-
| software.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Rasp...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| High bandwidth, low latency unified memory is a central
| component of the M series architecture and a key reason
| those chips perform so well at their power profile.
|
| I'm not sure what "evidence" I could provide that would
| convince you since we don't have high latency Apple chips
| to benchmark against. However, there's a reason VRAM is
| soldered onto GPUs.
| wtallis wrote:
| Soldered RAM doesn't really help much with latency; most
| of the DRAM latency ocurrs within the chip itself. Where
| soldering RAM does help is with reaching higher clock
| speeds with lower power (in phones and laptops), or with
| reaching clock speeds that are impossible to shove
| through a DIMM connector (GPUs).
|
| That higher frequency helps phones save on pin count by
| using a narrow memory bus, and allows laptops to have
| lots of memory bandwidth to feed the integrated graphics
| when using typical laptop/desktop bus widths.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _But an SSD that 's glued on to the motherboard has 0
| benefits_
|
| It's because, since the T2 chip and going on with Apple
| Silicon, they're not SSDs in the NVMe sense. They're an
| Apple-specific technology derived from their Anobit
| acquisition, that only look like an NVMe device to the upper
| layers.
| [deleted]
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah, that's what kills me.
|
| And the only viable mitigation strategies involve giving
| Apple more money.
|
| Spec'ing a larger onboard SSD to spread out the writes for
| hopefully longer endurance should be effective.
|
| And, perhaps, opting for more RAM to reduce VM writes to
| disk? I'm not sure if that's effective. Perhaps the resulting
| sleep file will be larger as well, resulting on more writes
| overall. I'm sure somebody can chime in on that?
|
| At least the newer models have SD card slots; can use SD
| cards for semidurable storage. They are obviously unsuitable
| for some things, but fine for others.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see
| the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the
| SOC on my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.
|
| It's not even clear that this has a performance benefit on
| typical workloads. At release the M1 was non-trivially faster
| than contemporaneous PC mobiles, but its competition was also
| using TSMC 7nm and DDR4.
|
| Now we've seen Zen3+ mobiles on 6nm with DDR5 and upgradeable
| memory and they're about the same speed for nearly everything
| despite the M1 being on 5nm, which basically proves they
| didn't need to solder the RAM.
| yakubin wrote:
| Not to mention that thinness is not a thing in case of Mac
| Mini.
| metadat wrote:
| "Thin" is also no longer a word I'd use to describe the
| current M1 Macbook Pros; they're significantly thicker and
| heavier than their Intel counterparts of old (bigger
| battery required to achieve that legendary battery life?)
| buran77 wrote:
| > significantly thicker and heavier than their Intel
| counterparts
|
| That's really hyperbolic.
|
| The 13" M1 MBP is 0.7mm thicker and 30g heavier than the
| equivalent Intel of not so old, 2015-2019 when the
| dimensions dropped to the lower bound.
| metadat wrote:
| I have both a 2019 Intel and 2022 M1, and the M1 is more
| than 0.5KG heavier and more than 0.7mm thicker.
|
| I was surprised to realize they'd made the newer machines
| significantly thicker and heavier. Both machines have
| their pros and cons, neither is perfect or terrible.
| buran77 wrote:
| All specs are available here [0]. Even if you compare
| different sizes the 14" M1 is still just ~230g heavier
| than the 13" Intel. At the same size (13") the
| differences are what I put above. "More than 0.5kg" means
| almost half the weight of the laptop. You need a 16" M1
| Pro to get there.
|
| [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300
| metadat wrote:
| Oops, I'd meant to specify, they are both 16".
|
| Thank you, buran777!
| buran77 wrote:
| At 16" it would still put them at a barely noticeable
| 100g (at 2kg) and 0.6mm difference. Even after Apple rid
| itself of Ive's obsession with thinness they would never
| go for "significantly thicker and heavier" than the
| previous model in a portable device.
|
| Can't really think of many (any?) laptops that have this
| mix of thin, light, high performance, and long battery
| life.
| ek750 wrote:
| I agree, I'd prefer longer battery life, and better
| performance in a slight weight and thickness tradeoff.
|
| Sadly, I've tried PC laptops (Surface tablet, Surface
| laptops and Asus laptops) and the performance (speed,
| thermals and battery life) are still nowhere near the
| Apple M1 hardware. I wish there was better
| price/performance from apple, but until the PC world has
| a strong contender, I don't see that happening.
|
| At least Intel has strong competition from AMD now :)
| caycep wrote:
| People complained because the thin ones didn't have the
| ports they wanted.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| And they're still complaining because one of the ports
| they wanted was the M.2 slot for the SSD.
|
| Some things are worth more than saving 10 grams.
| walrus01 wrote:
| The SSD is soldered onto the motherboard on all new apple
| laptops and has been for years, there is no replacing it
| without the whole board. Which can be 70% of the cost of a new
| laptop.
|
| Whatever ram and SSD config you buy when new is how it will be
| forever.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| That's reason enough for me to avoid these products. (I
| recognize that others may have different preferences).
|
| I have several old (5-15yrs) laptops still providing useful
| service. None of them is on the original HDD/SSD.
| Swinx43 wrote:
| This is the exact reason I am currently very uncomfortable
| with the idea of a new Macbook Pro for my own business use.
|
| On the one had it absolutely makes life a lot easier and
| all the software I need runs great on it. On the other I
| would by buying into a device I simply cannot upgrade or
| maintain myself. This makes me extremely uncomfortable.
|
| I dont want to run Windows as a daily driver since it is
| really jarring for my personal workflow etc. Yet Linux
| lacks quite a few of the essential pieces of software I
| need outside of development. E.g. (Krisp.AI, Reincubate
| Camo etc)
|
| Rock <--> Hard Place
| rootusrootus wrote:
| For as often as I've had to upgrade a machine, or had a
| hardware failure, I'd just choose whatever works best for
| my daily workflow. An inconvenient fix that takes my
| computer out of service for a day while I run over to the
| Apple Store that only happens every few years at most is
| just not comparable to something that puts a drag on my
| workflow every single day.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I was a windows user and thought the same thing for
| awhile about switching to Linux. I was heavily dependent
| on Adobe products to create PDF Forms. Then I realized I
| could use a CRM solution to handle the from creation for
| me. I wrote about my experience in switching to Linux and
| so far it is work well for me:
| https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-
| transi...
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Have you replaced SSD's because of failure or to upgrade? I
| personally have never seen an internal SSD fail. My 2018
| MacBook Pro has had zero issues, and I still use a Samsung
| Evo 840 SSD from 2013 in one of my PCs.
|
| I'm not agreeing with Apple soldering the SSD to the logic
| board. But they do seem to be significantly more reliable
| than hard drives.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Anecdotally, I did have a Samsung T5 go tits up on me not
| long ago. But that's an external drive. Not from physical
| abuse, either, it spent its life sitting on my desk.
|
| I've never had any kind of problem with internal SSDs.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I had 3 SSDs fail in the last 20 or so yeard, 128GB and
| 256 GB ssds from corsair and one 512, i think that one
| was samsung, not sure
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I actually did have an old 256GB Samsung die on me a few
| months ago. I'd say it was from 2014ish and had double
| it's write endurance.
| philjohn wrote:
| Similar here - 256GB 830 Pro, lasted damn close to a
| decade and was in my desktop, then my sons and finally my
| daughters before it died. Very high writes as well - it
| was a great SSD.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Usually to upgrade capacity, but I have had one personal
| SSD fail (I've used... 30? 35? in the last decade). It
| was an internal drive, 60 GB OCZ bought in 2012, failed
| in 2015.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| It was fixed more than a year ago in macOS 11.4
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/04/apple-resolves-m1...
| moffkalast wrote:
| Weird, you'd think Apple would be all for keeping that as a
| planned obsolescence feature. Maybe they still remember that
| time they got sued for the Iphone slowdown thing.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| This is kind of a weird diss against a phone manufacturer
| that regularly releases OS updates for devices that are
| over 5 years old. Are there others that even come close?
| Google abandoned their first-party Pixel 3 about 3-4 years
| in. I'm not sure Samsung has done any better.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| The 'iPhone Slowdown Thing' seems to be the 'McDonalds
| Frivolous Lawsuit" of the computer world. As in,
| misunderstood mainly for ideological reasons. What Apple
| did in response to aging batteries was perfectly sensible
| technically, what they failed to do was communicate it
| properly to the user.
| fencepost wrote:
| _What Apple did in response to aging batteries was
| perfectly sensible technically_
|
| Yep, and what would be even more sensible is allowing
| users to 'cap' the charge level the way Samsung has
| started to with a "charge only to 85%" ability. Don't
| just respond to aging batteries, allow steps to reduce
| aging.
|
| But, that goes against the upgrade sales process.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > a "charge only to 85%" ability
|
| Well not having battery charge control locked behind root
| as is now typically on android would definitely be a good
| first step.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Yep, and what would be even more sensible is allowing
| users to 'cap' the charge level the way Samsung has
| started to with a "charge only to 85%" ability.
|
| You can kinda do this with AOSP, but it's obnoxiously
| convoluted. You enable the adaptive charging feature,
| then set a silent alarm for 9:59, then set an alarm on
| something other than your phone so you can unplug your
| phone at 7:00 or so. (edit: or I guess you could get a
| smart outlet to cut power to your phone at 7:00)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > But, that goes against the upgrade sales process.
|
| Have you considered your own bias? Apple automatically
| caps battery charging at 80% but it is algorithmically
| controlled instead of a manual toggle. I would like the
| manual target, too, but if your narrative were accurate
| they would not have implemented the feature to begin
| with.
| sn0wf1re wrote:
| The obsession with thinner phones and undersized
| batteries to allow that was the real issue, in my
| opinion. Looking at a comparison list[1] the 6s has about
| half the battery capacity of the iPhone 13, and is the
| smallest battery of the entire iPhone lineup for its
| screen / face size.
|
| [1] https://www.knowyourmobile.com/user-guides/iphone-
| battery-si...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I would say call that tangential. Properly functioning
| batteries that are undersized are a battery life problem.
| A malfunctioning battery that cannot deliver enough
| current for the CPU at full power is a different problem.
| It could be argued that the smaller battery would degrade
| faster due to more cycles, but I don't recall whether
| there was general dissatisfaction with battery life on
| the 6S or not. I expect the battery on the 13 to be
| bigger because I assume (with no research, admittedly)
| that the SOC and screen both take a good bit more power
| than the equivalents on a 6S.
| russianGuy83829 wrote:
| Why is this article written for mac only?
| wrycoder wrote:
| The author is a Mac specialist, and a very good one.
| drooopy wrote:
| I guess that's because Apple is one of the few (for now)
| manufacturers that solder their SSDs to the motherboard.
| otterpro wrote:
| This is why I prefer separate SSDs (NVM.e) on my system based on
| usage. * `/root`, System/OS: fastest SSD with
| plenty of spare space * `/home`: 1+ TB for data, games,
| media, etc... * swap, `/tmp`, `/var`: separate cheap SSD
| (or even HDD) for frequent and unimportant writes
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I use USB stick/thumb drives in STBs/PVRs and no doubt they take
| a thrashing when repeatedly recording TV programs. Like most of
| us, I've many of them and whilst I try to keep the TV ones
| separate from those I use on my computers they often get mixed
| when I need one for my PC in a hurry.
|
| What I want to know is there any general purpose utility that is
| capable of testing a variety of brands of these devices and doing
| a decent assessment of their state/reliability?
|
| It seems that drive manufacturers don't provide much help here as
| I've not seen any such utilites for them. I raised this matter
| with a SanDisk rep at a trade show several years back and he said
| he didn't know of any.
|
| Same problem applies to SD cards (SDHC, SDXC, etc.), so any info
| on them would also be useful.
| beardedscotsman wrote:
| Isn't the problem with this, that they work till they fail. You
| can run some software that can tell you how dead the drive is,
| but you can't figure how likely it will die. Some drives I
| think have some stats you can access, but generally you can't
| tell until it fails.
|
| There used to be a great site before that was a data center
| publishing physical hdd stats, not looked for it for a long
| time, but I presume they would have ssd stats these days too.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I think you're right about working until they fail but I've
| only ever had anecdotal evidence to this effect.
|
| I also reckon much of the problem comes from the fact that
| information about them is proprietary--simply manufacturerers
| just don't tell us much about them as to do so may reveal
| trade secrets. Several decades ago I was involved in work
| where we had to have as large storage as possible
| irrespective of cost, back then a 1GB SanDisk was worth
| somewhere between $1k and $2k (we replaced single-sep time
| lapse remote monitoring film cameras with TV and needed large
| storage).
|
| We approached SanDisk (about the only manufacturer with such
| large drives at the time) and they were very reticent about
| telling us anything worthwhile--even though we were a large
| international organization and had clout. We needed to know
| the reliability so we had to investigate it ourselves, whilst
| we made some progress it was never fully satisfactory.
|
| Anecdotal info we learned from various sources was that
| manufacturerers had ways of testing them by altering the
| threshold voltage--the point where the gate potential would
| switch from 0 to 1. At a critical point one could check how
| many gates failed to switch and this voltage altered over
| time/with use. Monitoring this could provide useful info such
| as knowing when to retire a device before it failed.
|
| How accurate this info is I don't know but it seems to make
| sense. If true, we users should be demanding of
| manufacturerers utilities that are capable of doing such
| testing. Trouble is, manufacturerers continue to maintain
| this secrecy.
|
| PS: several days ago I put a brand new SanDisk 128GB in one
| of my PVRs and it's really hot to touch even when it's on
| standby (not recording TV). This isn't the first time I've
| noticed how hot they get. This isn't the PVR's fault as I've
| several different brands and the thumb drive gets very hot in
| each one including my PC. One wonders what this elevated
| temperature does to the reliability/service life.
| chasil wrote:
| An interesting thing about flash memory is that it can be
| rejuvenated if held at high temperature.
|
| Unfortunately, most plastic packaging precludes this. Solder
| connections would also be a problem.
|
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/12/02/2222235/self-he...
| hilbert42 wrote:
| That's interesting, I have a 500GB Crucial SSD that's
| essentially new and it failed (it failed progressively over
| some days until the drive wasn't recognized). I've done
| everything to get the data off it as nothing I do can see the
| drive (it's no longer recognized as a SATA drive).
|
| It may be worthwhile heating it up in the oven and see what
| happens (I can control the temp pretty accurately). Take the
| case off first etc. If it falls apart or the solder melts
| nothing's lost over and above what's happened already.
| chasil wrote:
| I am betting that heat would also erase the memory.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| That's probably a bad idea. Unless I'm confusing it with a
| different storage technology, heating flash memory has the
| not-really-side effect of erasing the data on it. The
| reason it rejuvenates it is because that also erases most
| of the effects of wear. (Think writing and erasing on a
| piece of paper until it's unreadably covered in smeared
| half-erased pencil residue, then grinding the paper up into
| pulp and pouring a new sheet of paper.) It can't be worse
| than nothing, but it's unlikely to be any better.
|
| I'd recommend instead (or at least first) desoldering the
| component memory chips and trying to read the data off of
| them directly with a microcontoller (bit-banging whatever
| protocol the drive uses internally). It's more (and slower
| and fiddlier) work, but also more likely to get at least
| some data back.
| biggerChris wrote:
| duffyjp wrote:
| Over the summer I had this idea I wanted a full linux install on
| a USB stick I could move from machine to machine. Years ago I had
| splurged on a really nice Sandisk Extreme 64GB (200MB/s+) and so
| I installed to that.
|
| _After_ installing, on the first boot KDE immediately informed
| me my drive was moments from death. I really appreciated that, as
| I had no idea. I didn 't know a thumb drive even had SMART
| capabilities. I had been using that drive in Windows for random
| things and it certainly never told me.
|
| Checking SMART it said something to the tune of data loss
| expected within 24 hours. Yikes.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Did you backup the disk and then run it to see if the
| prediction was correct?
|
| My first instinct would be to do the backup (of course), but a
| close second would be "yeah, that's probably not so precise as
| to make me be quite that lucky today..."
| LordHeini wrote:
| I gave up thinking about working live of SSDs.
|
| While I know that SSDs will die eventually, this has yet to
| happen to any of my private drives.
|
| Some of my drives are over 10 years old and still work something
| unheard of when it comes to rotating rust.
|
| And those are regularly used too some with ridiculous uptimes
| measured in years.
|
| The drives I replaced where changed for capacity reasons and not
| wear.
|
| Our company runs a bunch of servers with SSDs and even there they
| hold up pretty well. The last error was caused by a faulty
| controller some months ago.
| ejb999 wrote:
| I have 5 external SSD's that I use for backups (crucial brand),
| none more than 8 years old and 3 of the 5 have failed
| completely - luckily I keep multiple backups in multiple
| places, but no one should be lulled into a false sense of
| security with these things. They will and do fail, and often at
| the worst possible time. It sometimes keeps me up worrying if I
| have enough redundant backups in place.
| zerkten wrote:
| Can you post model numbers? I've never had good experiences
| with Crucial SSDs (internal or exteral) compared to Samsung,
| SanDisk and Intel. I've always bought the higher end models
| and not run an M.2 SSD in a small external enclosure like
| some do.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I've had one external SSD fail. No internal ones. Guessing
| there's a difference in how they're built.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| I have never had an internal SSD fail. But I have had a
| SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD die after about 14 months.
| Looking at the reviews a ton of people have had the same
| thing happen to them.
|
| External SSD's seem to be significantly less reliable. My
| theory is manufacturers are only designing them for short
| burst of data transfer. I often transfer 100's of gigabytes
| at a time and these external drives get extremely hot when
| doing so.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| I've been lucky with SSDs too. I have only had one fail on me
| (OCZ). Over the same period of time I have had 4x 2TB drives
| fail.
|
| The hard drives were for bulk storage too. The SSDs have been
| system drives.
| m463 wrote:
| I had a kingston drive go bad. It failed catastrophically, it
| did not degrade or become read-only. I lost everything on the
| drive.
|
| Since then I don't buy off-brand drives. I usually use samsung
| drives and have had no problems.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Same happened to me with a Samsung 850 EVO still under
| warranty. The only real "solution" is backups, backups,
| backups. Always has been.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Since then I don't buy off-brand drives
|
| Off-brand? Did you know Kingston produces >60% of world's
| DRAM and >20% of SSDs?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Isn't it Kingston though who doesn't actually manufacture
| any chips?
|
| I was fairly sure Kingston just slap their brand any old
| rubbish and sell it.
| viraptor wrote:
| They buy from Kioxia and Sandisk who are not exactly off-
| brand either.
| bluedino wrote:
| Kingston is definitely not an off-brand drive.
|
| Anecdotally I've had more Samsung drives fail on me than any
| other brand. Everything from OEM drives to retail EVO drives.
| sigg3 wrote:
| I've only had early Intel SSDs die on me. But they were early
| ones that were low capacity and cheap to backup.
| adql wrote:
| We had that on Samsungs, just drive invisible to system, 850,
| 860, PRO and EVO and I suspect newer too, we just didn't had
| any fail yet
| KleinPoes wrote:
| When shopping around I usually consult the SSD spreadsheet to
| find the specs I want. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d
| /1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcr...
|
| I stick to Samsung for PCIE4 and TLC+Marvel for anything
| else.
|
| I've only had an old OCZ Agility 3 64gb die, but it had a
| cruel life of being a cctv storage drive and still lasted
| about 8 years.
| adql wrote:
| My samsung 970 EVO threw bad blocks at me and destroyed
| windows install... at 90-something life left too
| shakow wrote:
| > something unheard of when it comes to rotating rust.
|
| That's false.
|
| I have a dozen original disks from 1988-1994 PCs that are still
| working to this day, and much more from the late 90's-early
| 00's.
| olabyne wrote:
| Correct me, but maybe the hard disk drives from that era are
| more reliable because of the low bit density ? And also
| survivor bias.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| i have two NAS 3TB WD Red drives that are about 10 years
| old and still going stong
| shakow wrote:
| It would be survivor bias if I ignored the failing disks.
| However, all of these are from machines which are in my
| family from the beginning. I don't have a precise tracking
| of all the HDDs we ever had, but I remember maybe 4-5 of
| out of maybe 20 failing over the course of ~30yrs, which is
| not incredibly awesome, but far from ``unheard of''.
| eric__cartman wrote:
| I have multiple consumer grade drives made in 2008-2010
| that have been used a lot and have more than 7 years of
| recorded time of the head flying over the platters and they
| still work fine. Some with zero reallocated sectors and
| others with 1-10 in the last decade. But the number hasn't
| changed for 3+ years in any drive so it doesn't bother me.
|
| Before you say it, of course I keep backups of everything.
| That's why I still use decade old hardware without much
| worry.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| It depends more on manufacturer/series/batch. In my
| experience good HDDs easily last 10+ years.
| recycledmatt wrote:
| You also tend to see a higher rate of failure in the
| first few years which then drops off over time
| fshr wrote:
| That guy was claiming 34 years of use. The disks would be
| incredibly low capacity compared to today.
| adql wrote:
| For us in heavy write load lifetime ("till zero wear level
| indicator") is around 4-5 years (with some as short as 2), but
| I had case of personal SSD dropping bad blocks with 95% life
| left.
|
| We do have some that sit at 1% life left and refuse to die tho
| Amezarak wrote:
| Adding onto the other comments here, this is not my experience
| at all. If a "spinning rust" harddrive makes it past a year or
| two, it seems to go on basically indefinitely. I have a drive
| from 2009 in active use, plus six (out of six) just about at
| ten years old in a NAS that get scrubbed monthly and have no
| errors. I've also had several that were around that age and
| only got replaced for performance or space reasons.
|
| I've only had one fail several years in, and I'm pretty sure it
| was environmentals (smoke) that did it in.
| icelancer wrote:
| We had two SSDs with high reliability ratings fail for us
| sequentially in a RAID array in a server, causing partial data
| loss. It definitely happens.
| netheril96 wrote:
| What kind of data loss? Some bits get flipped, whole sectors
| became garbage, or all zeros?
| pixl97 wrote:
| With SSD failures its commonly that the drive no longer
| works at all and the data loss is between your last backup
| and now.
| icelancer wrote:
| Whole drive failure. Likely the controller died.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > two SSDs with high reliability ratings fail for us
| sequentially in a RAID array in a server,
|
| Happens all the time when you buy storage in batches. We
| learned a lesson, go through 3-4 suppliers and split your
| orders over a three month period. Buying from one place in
| bulk is just guaranteeing data loss in your future.
| baruch wrote:
| I know that this idea nugget comes up time and time again
| when discussing drives, but I'm working on large storage
| systems for over 10 years now and dealing with the drives
| and their reliability and have yet to see such an
| occurrence.
|
| I've dealt with deployed systems that had (in many
| different clusters) a total of upwards of 100K HDDs and
| also with 10K SSDs and for extended periods.
|
| I saw tons of drive failures of many types but never even
| once did I see two or more drives of the same batch fail
| soon one after the other.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| It's not so much batch these days as conditions.
|
| Individual sellers probably use the same shipping method
| for every order and they may order in large batches which
| are transported at the same time. Although SSDs are a bit
| more resilient, hard temperature spikes in a single batch
| won't be detected after shipping. In the past, we would
| do this for hard drives because although parked heads are
| safe, high G-loads could actually unpark a head.
| icelancer wrote:
| Yeah I found this out post-incident from the Backblaze
| blog, which I read pretty religiously but this particular
| nugget of info escaped me.
| pizza234 wrote:
| There has been a case of a firmware bug, which caused SSDs to
| fail after a fixed amount of power-on time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148. There are some
| discussions of how RAID disks may serially fail, which
| shouldn't be inherent to SSDs.
| oyashirochama wrote:
| It literally happened to HN's drives which is kind of
| ironically funny.
| yakubin wrote:
| I have a bunch of 3.5" external spinning hard drives, which are
| about 5 years at this point. Contrary to internet legends that
| that's a recipe for data loss and really they should be in a
| NAS checking their integrity 24/7, they exhibit no data
| corruption whatsoever. (I do verify that periodically.)
| Yizahi wrote:
| I do very simple mental calculation.
|
| Preface .There was a test about memory endurance of the SSD,
| where they were actually written to death and precise number of
| data was measured (not estimated). That was in the age of Sata
| SSDs, so not super recent, but memory cells were actually more
| durable in those times, due to bigger tech process and lower
| number of bits per cell. In the end 256 Gb drives failed after
| writing 1-3 petabytes of data.
|
| So when I'm buying 1 Tb modern mid range drive, I expect about 4
| Pb of writes on it, but I halve that number because of the worse
| tech process and more levels per cell, and additionally halve
| again due to by personal build (SFF PC) operating at higher
| temperatures, not good for the lifespan.
|
| None of my drives have reached even 10% of 1 Pb yet, so I don't
| care too much about memory lifespan.
| robin_reala wrote:
| They missed out the heuristic of unpatched HPE SSDs lasting
| exactly 40k hours.
|
| https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en...
|
| This took down HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32028511
| chemmail wrote:
| That is why I put all my temp and cache files on my Optane Disk.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| It's too bad Optane failed. It legitimately improved latency
| over NAND flash.
| scns wrote:
| On Linux you can use part of your RAM as a compressed swap.
| There is zram and another program i don't remember.
| taubek wrote:
| What is Optane disk?
| sigwinch28 wrote:
| I assume GP is referring to https://www.intel.com/content/www
| /us/en/products/details/mem...
| endorphine wrote:
| Even though I don't use any external drives, I occasionally flirt
| with the idea of buying an SSD to collect music.
|
| But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of
| "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" and then I
| start thinking about backuos, at which point I'm like "nah scree
| this".
|
| Are there any recommendations for particular manufacturers to
| look for? (Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba etc)
|
| Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade SSD
| these days? I always think they'll die in 5 years, but that's
| totally out of my head and not from experience.
| adql wrote:
| The recommendation is to think about backups.
|
| > Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade
| SSD these days? I always think they'll die in 5 years, but
| that's totally out of my head and not from experience.
|
| Some have warranty that long but the fact you wont reach TBW
| doesn't mean it won't lose data.
|
| JESD218 spec only guarantees year of retention unpowered (for
| enterprise, 3 months for customer) soooo good fucking luck.
| Many manufacturers don't even say the guaranteed retention in
| datasheet.
|
| Also, once you finish setup your backups make a calendar entry
| to test restores at least every year (preferably more often).
| lstodd wrote:
| I write this from a laptop with a Plextor M5Pro from 2015
| which was forgotten on a balcony (above/below zero temp
| swings, humidity and all) for three straight years. It all
| comes down to manufacturing tolerances, and damn the
| standards. Even the battery still somewhat works.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| For music collection and playback (low-bandwidth low-
| parallelism sequential reads), a mechanical drive would
| probably be substantially cheaper than SSD for large capacities
| without a substantial performance hit (though I don't know if
| you even need terabytes to store music). Anyway I have a 256GB
| Samsung 850 PRO SSD from a 2016 laptop, which I've used on and
| off and swapped between devices, and hasn't failed yet.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| SSD 1Tb Crucial BX500 - $70
|
| WD Blue 1TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s
| 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD10EZRZ - $50
|
| I can't say what $20 is 'substantially cheaper'. Sure, if you
| need dozens of TBs...
|
| And currently you have a big chance of getting an SMR HDD,
| which is... quite a gamble.
| korv wrote:
| That's a very expensive HDD. Amazon got the 4 TB WD Blue
| for $65
| 83 wrote:
| I've been averaging about $19 per 4tb SAS drive on ebay
| (refurbs), though sata tends to cost a little more being
| the more common format.
|
| I've had great luck with surplus HGST drives, they tend
| to be more reliable than Seagate.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Not sure what OP's specific use case is, but for me, the one
| big downside of spinning drives is noise. And even if the
| drive itself may be fairly quiet, you have to make sure its
| vibrations don't propagate to furniture where they can get
| amplified.
| outworlder wrote:
| 2.5 inch drives spinning at 5400 RPM are nearly silent (and
| that can be improved further if you tell the drive you want
| it to be silent).
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of
| "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?"
|
| Buy 2. Sync the devices regularly. Better to have 2 512GB
| drives and deal with syncing them once a while and half the
| space than 1 1TB drive and it's all gone due to any issue.
|
| Never completely depend on a single storage device.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Music collection is typically "write once, read forever". It's
| hard to estimate the lifetime of such read-only SSDs, but it's
| measured in decades, _if it's regularly powered on and read
| entirely_. If it's not powered for years, you're going to risk
| data loss due to thermal noise flipping bits randomly beyond
| the built-in ECC capabilities. If you keep it powered on, you
| still need to regularly scrub it (i.e. read all data) to force
| the firmware to fix and write back flipped bits. Some firmwares
| _may_ do this periodically by themselves, but it's a black box,
| so you must do it yourself to be sure.
|
| I wouldn't recommend relying on a single drive for long-term
| storage of anything that's worth more than ~$1000 - neither
| with SSDs nor HDDs. Freak accidents can happen with any
| component. You PSU can go rogue and fry your SSD, etc.
|
| The best option is most likely a single local drive with
| continuous mirroring to a cloud service. The drawback is the
| ongoing cost of the cloud, and the possibility of partial data
| loss, because cloud mirroring won't be instantenous when saving
| bulk data.
|
| A local RAID1 array is cost-efficient, but doesn't save you
| from black-swan events like floods or house fires.
| ciphol wrote:
| I had a SSD fail not long ago. It was used regularly, but one
| day I noticed that reading a large file failed. I went into
| panic mode and stopped using it and attempted to copy
| everything to a new drive, but copying many of the large
| files failed. These large files consisted of things like
| music which had not been edited for years. This sounds like
| neither of your scenarios - not thermal bit flipping, and not
| overwriting. How common are failures of this sort?
| Sakos wrote:
| Frankly, we have no idea. If the manufacturers know,
| they're not telling us. I've seen dozens of failed SSDs and
| their failure modes are completely different from rotating
| disks and almost always lead to complete or significant
| data loss with little to no warning.
|
| What numbers we have show that failure rates are low, but
| honestly I would give it another decade or two before using
| SSD for persistent data storage (of important data without
| backups to rotating disks). I don't think we're there yet.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think you're missing that there is no such thing as 'not
| edited' on a SSD. Data gets moved around by firmware all
| the time in order to ensure wear leveling is applied
| equally all over the drive. This is the exact kind of
| failure you should expect on an SSD.
| _tom_ wrote:
| While backing up to a cloud is good, and gets the data
| offsite, bear in mind the chance of losing data there.
|
| The primary issue is not the 10 to the minus X failure rate
| they quote, but the much more likely chance that you will
| lose access to the data for some reason. For example, the
| account is hacked, someone closes the account, or the account
| just deleted/restricted by the provider.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Yes, the cloud is someone else's computer.
|
| But I'd say it's unlikely that your local copy and the
| cloud backup would get destroyed at the same time.
|
| Also, when I said "cloud", I meant a proper cloud service
| with an SLA like S3 Glacier, not Google Drive which gets
| wiped if your Google account is disabled for uploading a
| YouTube video with background music.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| This is the perfect usecase for blu-ray drive and M-disks,
| that allegendy last 100 years. You can make multiple copies,
| mail them to friends, etc
|
| Alternatively you could get a NAS, they are great.
|
| Life experience has taught me not to trust detachable drives
| at all
| chasil wrote:
| Stepping up from the filesystem, you are yearning for ZFS.
|
| It's bundled on the Ubuntu installer, though it taints the
| kernel.
|
| You need a mirror or raid pool. Set the checksum to sha256
| before copying your music over if you want the utmost
| protection.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| For drives Samsung has been good to me. I have only ever had
| one SSD die on me and that was an OCZ Vertex 2.
|
| I would look into Blackblaze personal backup for your use case.
| Just make it a habbit to download and test your backups.
| dale_glass wrote:
| For me they've been rock solid, and I've yet to see one die. I
| replace them much earlier than that because they just get too
| small to be useful.
|
| I've got a 240 GB Intel SSD with 49254 hours on it. That's 5.6
| years worth of constant work. Still kicking. Not doing anything
| heavy though. The only reason it's still doing anything is
| because it's in a firewall. It does run Prometheus though, so
| it's not completely idle.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?"
|
| This is not a hypothetical; all drives do fail at some point -
| it's just a matter of when.
|
| The only way to be safe are external backups, not even RAID
| (which in unlucky cases, can suffer from serial failure).
|
| If one really doesn't want to spend any money, an option is to
| periodically backup to an external drive, although cloud
| backups are relatively cheap and automated, nowadays. But also
| this is subject to localized mass-failure, ie. burglaries.
| eCa wrote:
| My daily computer (tower pc) is coming up on 9 years. The OS
| drive is a 250gb Samsung SSD. I'd estimate that this computer
| on average has been running about 8 hours per day during its
| lifetime. But this is very much YMMV. (New computer is on its
| way, finally.)
|
| Also, SSD only for music collection seems expensive. I'd get a
| 2TB (or whatever size seems reasonable) spinner, and put the
| rest of the funds towards backups (like Backblaze).
| rkagerer wrote:
| Out of curiosity what OS were you running and what will you
| have on the new one?
| eCa wrote:
| Win 8.1 -> Win 11 (pro)
| outworlder wrote:
| > But every time I get a little bit paranoid about the idea of
| "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?" and then I
| start thinking about backuos, at which point I'm like "nah
| scree this".
|
| If your data is that important you'll want 3 - 2 - 1. 3 copies
| of data: two in different media, one offsite(offsite includes
| cloud these days)
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > "what if it suddenly dies and I loose everything?"
|
| Can you tell the difference in "what if {HDD,SDD} suddenly dies
| and I loose everything?"?
|
| > Also, how much is the average lifetime of a consumer-grade
| SSD these days?
|
| Years.
|
| Actually with all that TLC/QLC/xLC you can get even less than
| some old-time ones, but they are cheap and you can get much
| more than you need, so you will have plenty of resource to
| spare, ie if you have 250GBs of music - you can buy 1TB and
| have x4 'over-provision', if you have 1TB - buy 2TB or more.
|
| And as others said, music collection is basically WORM so you
| probably would have the problem of finding an ancient USB3
| controller to attach your ancient USB->SATA/NVME external drive
| for your new shiny holodeck with USB23423 in 2042 than it to
| die on you.
| dale_glass wrote:
| What's the wear-out failure mode of a modern SSD? Has anyone
| experienced it?
|
| Does it fail to read? Does it go read-only? Do OSes actually keep
| track of the stat and pop up a warning "Only 5% life left!"?
| Yizahi wrote:
| In the old test of Sata SSDs, all written to death, most of the
| drives was accessible after the last eventual write. None or
| almost none of the drives were even visible to the OS after
| system reboot. It seems that while memory itself may still be
| readable, the controller and OS can't handle such failure mode
| and it certainly wasn't tested. So I wouldn't expect any modern
| SSD to be readable after exhausting all writes completely.
|
| https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...
| Sakos wrote:
| Officially, they're supposed to go into read-only mode. In
| practice, out of the around 2 dozens of failures I've seen, a
| single one was still readable and the rest were complete loss
| of data. I wouldn't count on it, personally.
| pifm_guy wrote:
| More than half the failures I have seen are
| 'electronics/firmware' problems. Ie. It is not caused by
| degradation of the flash memory, but instead caused by the
| controller going bad, refusing to initialize, having a bad
| internal power supply, etc.
|
| Obviously without the manufacturer's internal debug tools it's
| really hard to properly root cause issues.
| Unrectified wrote:
| I thought about this as well.. I wish there was an easy way
| to find out which ssd brands get easy fwupd updates and such
| Forge36 wrote:
| I've had two failures. One started audibly clicking and I
| replaced before full failure (it support said it was common).
|
| Second failure was complete disconnect from the OS (USB drive)
| no warning. Once it cooled down i tried again, device appeared
| and reported no disk installed
| dale_glass wrote:
| How can a SSD click?
| defrost wrote:
| Another approach is to look at hard use data from racked storage
| providers.
|
| Eg: _BackBlaze: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-year Review_
|
| > As of June 30, 2022, there were 2,558 SSDs in our storage
| servers. This compares to 2,200 SSDs we reported in our 2021 SSD
| report. We'll start by presenting and discussing the quarterly
| data from each of the last two quarters (Q1 2022 and Q2 2022).
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-revi...
| Rzor wrote:
| It's worth to read it all, but the gist of it is:
|
| _And the Winner Is..._ _At this point we can reasonably claim
| that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as
| boot drives in our environment. This supports the anecdotal
| stories and educated guesses made by our readers over the past
| year or so. Well done._
|
| _We'll continue to collect and present the SSD data on a
| regular basis to confirm these findings and see what's next. It
| is highly certain that the failure rate of SSDs will eventually
| start to rise. It is also possible that at some point the SSDs
| could hit the wall, perhaps when they start to reach their
| media wearout limits. To that point, over the coming months
| we'll take a look at the SMART stats for our SSDs and see how
| they relate to drive failure. We also have some anecdotal
| information of our own that we'll try to confirm on how far
| past the media wearout limits you can push an SSD. Stay tuned._
| chupasaurus wrote:
| > APFS doesn't try to write the changed data to the same blocks,
| but uses copy-on-write to write new blocks each time.
|
| While pretty much every SSD controller by other vendors does it
| by itself because bringing it to OS level is a waste of CPU
| cycles.
| eemil wrote:
| I don't care about SSD reliability (and failure modes) on
| laptop/desktop computers. I even run my desktop with two SSDs in
| RAID 0.
|
| Even if you have a RAID 1 setup (two SSDs operating redundantly),
| there are plenty of points of failure, many of which are more
| likely than a modern SSD failing:
|
| * Theft
|
| * Physical damage
|
| * Water damage
|
| * Data corruption
|
| * rm -rf
|
| You need backups in any case, even if SSDs were 100% reliable.
| jotm wrote:
| IME, if it worked fine for a year and has less than 100TB
| written, it's good for another 3-4.
|
| They usually fail early or very late. Assuming good cooling.
| dcm360 wrote:
| Most SSD's will provide metrics that are quite readable for
| estimating the lifetime left for the drive. Most nvme-drive
| expose a line with 'Percentage used' in the nvme log (just use
| smartctl to read the nvme log). With sata-drives it is a bit more
| hit or miss, but the couple of drives I have lying around at the
| moment record wear leveling in Wear_Leveling_Count, which does
| provide the raw wear leveling count and the lifetime left as
| normalized VALUE.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Hard Disk Sentinel is great for helping with this. The
| developer has been at it for years, figured out all kinds of
| quirks of different disks and controllers.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| >just use smartctl to read the nvme log
|
| "sudo smartctl -l ssd /dev/sdaWhatever", for anyone interested.
| randyrand wrote:
| smartctl --all /dev/disk0 Percentage Used:
| 2% Data Units Written: 97,255,284 [49.7 TB]
|
| This is after 1 year of full time development.
|
| My drive is 1TB (with 16GB RAM) so it should be 2.5PB Total Byte
| Written Lifespan.
| adrian_b wrote:
| After a year and a half of usage, on a 2-TB SSD:
| Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read:
| 1,118,827,429 [572 TB] Data Units Written:
| 432,707,145 [221 TB] Power Cycles:
| 484 Power On Hours: 1,106
|
| The power-on hours, during which the read-write activity
| happened, correspond to only 46 days, because the rest of the
| time the SSD was presumably powered-down by the OS, due to
| inactivity.
| jghn wrote:
| Just over 2 years on a 500GB M1 mac
| Percentage Used: 14% Data Units
| Read: 1,101,421,696 [563 TB] Data
| Units Written: 902,660,422 [462 TB]
| Power Cycles: 238 Power On
| Hours: 2,489
|
| Assuming the %age used is even close to accurate, I'll be
| upgrading to a new device long before the disk craps out.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| One thing I've always wondered about is how the ECC is handled on
| a modern SSD with regards to data retention.
|
| SSDs often have a data retention spec that basically defines how
| long you have until your bits start flipping, and it usually
| falls off a cliff w.r.t. temperature, which can make SSDs non-
| ideal for offline backups.
|
| However, I've read that reading from the SSD periodically allows
| it to detect these errors. Some say that even keeping it just
| powered on is enough.
|
| My question is, do SSDs run some sort of internal scrub while
| they're powered on? I don't think so, based off of some power
| consumption tests I've done.
|
| Also, if they do detect an ECC error, will they actually re-write
| the block in question, or just correct it and return a successful
| IO, while leaving the compromised data still on the media?
| andromeduck wrote:
| IIRC, it periodically scans the blocks level metadata during
| lulls. Reads don't take much power but for some larger drives
| something like 20% of activity was towards maintenance and the
| guaranteed retention period without power was only something
| like 2-3 months.
| maltris wrote:
| Low TBW SSDs from Samsung are quite accurate in their TBW value.
| I've seen a lot of them die right around their indicated TBW
| span.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I just replace them once they reach 20% of "percentage (of
| their lifespan) used or so and then they become yet more drives
| on which I put on-site / offline backups.
|
| They're so cheap I don't mind.
| trap_goes_hot wrote:
| Has there been an evaluation on whether the SMART data is
| valid/accurate?
|
| It would seem that the vendor is incentivized to not report the
| most accurate data so their drive doesn't come across as bad
| and/or to avoid warranty claims.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Why is this not as simple as getting a notification in every
| major operating system?
| duffyjp wrote:
| It really should be. I posted a little anecdote* about KDE
| doing just that after using the same drive in Windows for years
| without a peep.
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33866560
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