Re: SSDD reliability

On 05/05/11 03:31, David Boreham wrote:
> On 5/4/2011 11:15 AM, Scott Ribe wrote:
>>
>> Sigh... Step 2: paste link in ;-)
>>
>> <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html>
>>
> To be honest, like the article author, I'd be happy with 300+ days to
> failure, IF the drives provide an accurate predictor of impending doom.
> That is, if I can be notified "this drive will probably quit working in
> 30 days", then I'd arrange to cycle in a new drive.
> The performance benefits vs rotating drives are for me worth this hassle.
>
> OTOH if the drive says it is just fine and happy, then suddenly quits
> working, that's bad.
>
> Given the physical characteristics of the cell wear-out mechanism, I
> think it should be possible to provide a reasonable accurate remaining
> lifetime estimate, but so far my attempts to read this information via
> SMART have failed, for the drives we have in use here.

In what way has the SMART read failed?
(I get the relevant values out successfully myself, and have Munin graph
them.)

> FWIW I have a server with 481 days uptime, and 31 months operating that
> has an el-cheapo SSD for its boot/OS drive.

Likewise, I have a server with a first-gen SSD (Kingston 60GB) that has
been running constantly for over a year, without any hiccups. It runs a
few small websites, a few email lists, all of which interact with
PostgreSQL databases.. lifetime writes to the disk are close to
three-quarters of a terabyte, and despite its lack of TRIM support, the
performance is still pretty good.

I'm pretty happy!

I note in the comments of that blog post above, it includes:

"I have shipped literally hundreds of Intel G1 and G2 SSDs to my
customers and never had a single in the field failure (save for one
drive in a laptop where the drive itself functioned fine but one of the
contacts on the SATA connector was actually flaky, probably from
vibrational damage from a lot of airplane flights, and one DOA drive). I
think you just got unlucky there."

I do have to wonder if this Portman Wills guy was somehow Doing It Wrong
to get a 100% failure rate over eight disks..