SSD Drives over 5 years old | FerrariChat

SSD Drives over 5 years old

Discussion in 'Technology' started by Innovativethinker, Aug 9, 2019.

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  1. Innovativethinker

    Innovativethinker F1 Veteran
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    If you have an SSD that is 4-5 years old, you may want to consider replacing them now.

    Just sayin.
     
  2. fatbillybob

    fatbillybob Two Time F1 World Champ
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    I thought no moving parts so bullit-proof? So old school hard drives with disc and needle prevail? I have had old school things last forever.
     
  3. tomc

    tomc Two Time F1 World Champ

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    Care to elaborate?
    We have some archival data on SSDs.
    Thanks
    T
     
  4. Innovativethinker

    Innovativethinker F1 Veteran
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    I've been buying SSDs since 2013, and they are now failing. I've had both crucial and intel drives fail.

    Not allot of options when they do fail, I've tried this to no avail: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/

    The reality is that SSD drives have only so many writes, in 2013, a 250 gig drive was $450, and a 90 gig was $125, so we didn't get big ones. This may have effected the number of writes we had available.

    Here is a decent article on lifespan of an SSD: https://www.ontrack.com/blog/2018/02/07/how-long-do-ssds-really-last/

    Perhaps "lifespan" is a poor choice, more like "usage limit". When you hit that limit it degrades or stops. Since we had smaller drives, and every drive was used at least 40 hours a week, and just about every article I've read points to 5 years of use, so I have used up the effective life of my drives.

    We also never shut off our computers, so whatever stupid stuff windows does while idle, including gigs and gigs of updates, may have contributed to the death of the drives.

    Be aware that just about every SSD manufacturer has a utility to monitor the remaining life of your ssd drive. If you are using them I strongly recommend you download and run it.
     
  5. Innovativethinker

    Innovativethinker F1 Veteran
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  6. Innovativethinker

    Innovativethinker F1 Veteran
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    If they are stuck in a data safe you probably don't have to worry, although we always create at *least* two copies and place them in separate physical locations.

    If they are in a live system, I would create copies and stick those in a data safe.
     
  7. tomc

    tomc Two Time F1 World Champ

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    OK, thanks. We have redundant backups of critical data: SSDs, DDN storage array (I think that's the jargon our system guys uses), hard drives, etc...T
     
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  8. Wade

    Wade Three Time F1 World Champ
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    Glad I'm not one of those who implemented a cloud/RAID solution relying exclusively on solid state drives.
     
  9. David_S

    David_S F1 World Champ
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    Think I've had 2 old school platter type drives fail. One was probably 12 years old, the other was quite a bit older than that.

    None of the HDs in any of my systems I'm currently running are LESS than 5 years old, but none of them are SSD, either.
     
  10. losgatos789

    losgatos789 Formula Junior
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    #10 losgatos789, Aug 29, 2019
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2019
    Very true.

    bit of history on this..

    I was/am involved with extreme big data analytics (zetabytes) and began using SSD storage for special real time analytic apps involving the largest data intensive companies in the world around 2008.

    The storage vendors tried like mad to make enterprise grade SSD have increased write counts, without much success. Side note: there is a reason why you don't see commercial grade SSDs very much, why you mostly see "inexpensive" consumer grade SSDs, and a mean time before failure = 5 yrs on consumer drives.

    When an SSD drive failed occurred, as pointed out by Mark, we called that a catastrophic "avalanche" failure. Unrecoverable.

    During failure analysis, we observed data write skewing or biasing. Interestingly, some areas of silicon were more prone to "writing" then other areas that were suppose to have an equal chance to "write" data. Hence, we saw quite a few SSDs have pre avalanche failures involving too many writes to a single location while concurrently seeing many locations with little data writes.

    Several other industry people noticed this behavior. One company in the Silicon Valley, Violin Memories 2013ish, attempted to preempt excessive write skewing locations by writing algo firmware into the controller in order to programmatically (evenly distribute) writes to all addressable SSD write locations.

    They got acquired by EMC. After Dell acquired EMC, most of this research, to my limited knowledge, became shelf-ware.

    For large analytic data intensive companies I have worked for, we historically architect storage into hot, warm, and cold where hot (SSD, redundant, expensive) is data that is needed in the moment /near term for high IO and calcs. If data / results are unused after N periods of time, the data is autogroomed /moved to high speed rotating disk (expensive/redundant/safe). After N period of not accessed on high speed disk, data auto groomer / moved to slow speed (inexpensive) redundant disk.

    The hot SSD for commercial heavy I/O write began to give way to another approach. UC Berkeley's Amp Lab open sourced the original Ignite, an Apache project...2014ish = move large storage memory / compute intensive data across distributed caches across distributed servers...= cheap and inexpenseive for certain requirements

    For home, I use 1TD SSD on my workstation and have Apple's Time Machine backup all SSD data to 10terabyte external drive.

    Best of FAST and "inexpensive/redundant/recoverable data".
     
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  11. vraa

    vraa F1 Rookie
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    SSDS SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR ARCHIVAL!!!!!!
     
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  12. vraa

    vraa F1 Rookie
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    OPTANE OR BUST

    SPINNING RUST IS FOR THE BOOMER GENERATION
     
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  13. TestShoot

    TestShoot F1 World Champ
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    I have a 9 year old one that is running fine but it is in a computer i stopped working on daily about 3 years ago.
     
  14. 4th_gear

    4th_gear F1 Rookie

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    As already alluded to, one should always employ a variety of storage media. In the past when media was more expensive per GB, we used to select media type depending on how fast WRITE and READ speeds you require, as well as how often the written data will change.

    My comments on this topic only apply to personal use rather than a commercial, multiuser environment.

    IMO, the operating system and applications should go on the fastest SSD you can afford. Keep that volume to an optimum size and performance so you can maintain optimum free space to avoid fragmented files, e.g. for page files, updates but keep the physical drive sized to just those types of files. If you cannot afford downtime, backup an image of the SSD to a cheap HD. Thus the SSD is completely expendable if it craps out. All you do is replace the SSD and recover from the image backup of the SSD.

    I store all data on fast multiple removable hard drives. Any data left on my SSD are considered short term, temporary or expendable. This allows me to protect important long term data simply by taking them with me or if you want to, you can also mirror them. This also allows me to move, remount the data HDs on different computers with apps or hardware for particular tasks. HDs are extremely cheap and constantly improve in performance. Most data files are relatively small unless you deal a lot with video, very large image or audio files. So you really don’t need or benefit from SSD level performance with most mundane data. It’s really when you start up a new operating system process or fire up a large app that you get huge movements of data on storage media. If performance and recoverability of data are really important I would look at RAID solutions.
     
  15. NbyNW

    NbyNW F1 Rookie
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    So what happens to my iMac with the Fusion Drive SSD? If the SSD starts to fail does it ignore the bad areas or does it all fail?
     
  16. Whisky

    Whisky Two Time F1 World Champ
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    I have an SSD that ONLY my O/S is on, everything else is on spinners, and I hook up
    another spinner via USB port about once a month to backup my spinners. That's about all I
    need, really, backup-wise.
    When my SSD fails, all I need to do is get another one and reload the O/S to it, and I don't
    trust 'Ghost' anymore, it used to work great - 15 years ago, but today? Meh...

    I am contemplating a Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB for my laptop... any opinions?
     
  17. TestShoot

    TestShoot F1 World Champ
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    The Samsung EVOs are not bad. They seem to be dominating the casual market at places like BestBuy. I am actually looking in to upgrading my 256 and 512gb nvme drives in my laptop to that line.
     
  18. Innovativethinker

    Innovativethinker F1 Veteran
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    The Samsung ones are fine, but with every SSD be sure you use the software provided to check the health from time to time.

    We have had a number of drives fail on windows updates, however we cloned the bad drive, installed the cloned drive and it recovered. Apparently windows used flaky parts of the drive for its update files. Saved allot of work doing it this way.
     
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  19. Whisky

    Whisky Two Time F1 World Champ
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    Check out microcenter.com i love this place.

    I want an EVO, not the QVO, the evo's are faster in one respect ( which i doubt we could tell the diff),
    But the main thing i read is the evo's use less power. Fwiw.
     
  20. TestShoot

    TestShoot F1 World Champ
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    I have been shopping at the Microcenter in Tustin CA for 25 years lol My brother still goes there, they have always been amazing for knowledgeable staff.
     
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  21. Etcetera

    Etcetera Two Time F1 World Champ
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    QVO's are trash. They use a different type of chip than EVO and have slow transfer speeds which they cloak by using a cache of conventional chips. Once that cache is used up, the performance drops through the floor. If you are a light user, then that might not matter....but why get a drive with such odd drawbacks that EVO units do not have. QVO drives were supposed to be a lot cheaper than EVO units, but the savings never materialized.
     
  22. BOKE

    BOKE Beaks' Gun Rabbi
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    The Samsung EVO and the Crucial MX500 series are good to go, IMHO.

    SSDs are excellent for boot drives in desktops and primary drives in laptops. Spinning disks are the only way to go in servers or NAS applications.

    Daily read/write cycles in storage applications or backups do take a toll on SSDs.
     
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  23. Whisky

    Whisky Two Time F1 World Champ
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    I have written to MC twice begging them to come here,
    the nearest one is 200 miles away, and with a town area of
    over a million people in 25 sq miles, we have NO place that
    sells any computer components.
    A lot of the folks I know don't really like to buy this kind of
    stuff over the internet, but we don't have a choice...
     
  24. TestShoot

    TestShoot F1 World Champ
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    Well butter my biscuits, I had two drives in a drawer I pulled out that were both dead. 256gb drives, no big loss.
     
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