[HN Gopher] Unpowered SSD endurance investigation finds data los...
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Unpowered SSD endurance investigation finds data loss and
performance issues
Author : progval
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-04-19 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| csdvrx wrote:
| For long term storage, prefer hard drives (careful about CMR vs
| SMR)
|
| If you have specific random IO high performance needs, you can
| either
|
| - get a SLC drive like https://news.solidigm.com/en-
| WW/230095-introducing-the-solid...
|
| - make one yourself by hacking the firmware:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578
|
| Be careful when you use something "exotic", and do not trust
| drives that are too recent to be fully tested: I learned my
| lesson for M2 2230 drives
| https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/17pztue/warning_you_ma...
| which seems validated by the large numbers of similar experiences
| like https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793
| dragontamer wrote:
| If you care about long term storage, make a NAS and run ZFS
| scrub (or equivalent) every 6 months. That will check for
| errors and fix them as they come up.
|
| All error correction has a limit. If too many errors build up,
| it becomes unrecoverable errors. But as long as you reread and
| fix them within the error correction region, it's fine.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > run ZFS scrub (or equivalent) every 6 months
|
| zfs in mirror mode offers redundancy at the block level but
| scrub requires plugging the device
|
| > All error correction has a limit. If too many errors build
| up, it becomes unrecoverable errors
|
| There are software solutions. You can specify the redundancy
| you want.
|
| For long term storage, if using a single media that you can't
| plug and scrub, I recommend par2
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive?useskin=vector) over
| NTFS: there are many NTFS file recovery tools, and it
| shouldn't be too hard to roll your own solution to use the
| redundancy when a given sector can't be read
| WalterGR wrote:
| What hardware, though? I want to build a NAS / attached
| storage array but after accidentally purchasing an SMR
| drive[0] I'm a little hesitant to even confront the project.
|
| A few tens of TBs. Local, not cloud.
|
| [0] Maybe 7 years ago. I don't know if anything has changed
| since, e.g. honest, up-front labeling.
|
| [0*] For those unfamiliar, SMR is Shingled Magnetic
| Recording.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording
| 3np wrote:
| [delayed]
| ErneX wrote:
| I use TrueNAS and it does a weekly scrub IIRC.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > (careful about CMR vs SMR)
|
| Given the context of long term storage... why?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| After I was bamboozled with a SMR drive, always great to just
| make the callout to those who might be unaware. What a piece
| of garbage to let vendors upsell higher numbers.
|
| (Yes, I know some applications can be agnostic to SMR, but it
| should never be used in a general purpose drive).
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Untested hypothesis, but I would expect the wider spacing
| between tracks in CMR makes it more resilient against random
| bit flips. I'm not aware of any experiments to prove this and
| it may be worth doing. If the HD manufacture can convince us
| that SMR is just as reliable for archival storage it would
| help them sell those drives since right now lots of people
| are avoiding SMR due to poor performance and the infamy of
| the bait-and-switch that happened a few years back.
| sitkack wrote:
| Tape is extremely cheap now. I booted up a couple laptops that
| have been sitting unpowered for over 7 years and the sata SSD
| in one of them has missing sectors. It had zero issues when
| shutdown.
| seszett wrote:
| Is tape actually cheap? Tape drives seem quite expensive to
| me, unless I don't have the right references.
| wtallis wrote:
| Tapes are cheap, tape drives are expensive. Using tape for
| backups only starts making economic sense when you have
| enough data to fill dozens or hundreds of tapes. For
| smaller data sets, hard drives are cheaper.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > - make one yourself by hacking the firmware:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578 Be careful when
| you use something "exotic", and do not trust drives that are
| too recent to be fully tested
|
| Do you realize the irony of cautioning about buying off the
| shelf hardware but recommending hacking firmware yourself?
| rkagerer wrote:
| I would never buy a no-name SSD. Did it once long ago and got
| bit, wrote a program to sequentially write a pseudorandom
| sequence across the whole volume then read back and verify, and
| proved all 8 Pacer SSD's I had suffered corruption.
| WalterGR wrote:
| That's also fairly common for cheap 'thumb drives', as I
| understand it. I've been bitten by that before.
|
| (Edit: Allegedly if you use low-numbered storage blocks you'll
| be okay, but the advertised capacity (both packaging and what
| it reports to OS) is a straight-up lie.)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion on the original source: (20 points, 3 days ago, 5
| comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43702193
|
| Related: _SSD as Long Term Storage Testing_ (132 points, 2023,
| 101 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35382252
| bityard wrote:
| I didn't think it was controversial that SSDs are terrible at
| long term storage?
| wmf wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's controversial but I suspect most people
| don't know about it. There's been a lot of discussion about SSD
| write endurance but almost none about retention.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Endurance is proportional to programming temperature. In the
| video, when all four SSDs are installed at once, the composite
| device temperature ranges over 12o. This should be expected to
| influence the outcomes.
| ein0p wrote:
| This is a known issue. You have to power up your SSDs (and flash
| cards, which are based on even more flimsy/cost optimized version
| of the same tech) every now and then for them to keep data. SSDs
| are not suitable for long term cold storage or archiving.
| Corollary: don't lose that recovery passphrase you've printed out
| for your hardware crypto key, the flash memory in it is also not
| eternal.
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