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[Chrysalis]

My oldest SSD I think is about to die, I am about to try and image the drive.

Its a samsung 830 128gig, its a MLC drive.

In terms of flash usage, its not even used 5% of its rated life.

Symptons are it randomly isnt available at post, and becoming inaccessible to the operating system.

Meanwhile my 10 year old WD Black spindle is still going strong, although I am in the process of demoting it to my ESXi/proxmox machine from main PC.

It powers the hardware that i run my dslstats from, so those will stop monitoring yet again, sorry for anyone who watches my line.

Unlike HDD's as others with dead SSD's reported there is no pre warning on this drive from SMART data, 0 CRC, 0 write failures etc.

Code: [Select]

[root@WIN-TEST:~] df -h
VmFileSystem: SlowRefresh() failed: Unable to get FS Attrs for /vmfs/volumes/5963bec2-63d09362-4cc7-001b213de643
Error when running esxcli, return status was: 1
Errors:
Cannot open volume:

 

[Weaver]

That is really good to know, and bad news. It seems these things were really never meant to be rewritten a gazillion times. And we ignored that and are now perhaps doing so.

Back in 1989, if memory serves, which it probably does not, my boss said in a press conference at the Savoy "you’d be an old man". He was quite right, and we are now old men, and also are abusing them at a rate that was not even under discussion on that day then.

[Chrysalis]

might possibly be a false alarm, I swapped out the sata cable and it appears ok again, but obviously I copied all data incase I am wrong, will see and update the thread.

The smart data now shows 5700 CRC errors.

[Bowdon]

I wonder if there is a difference in ssd quality with the sata ssd's and these m.2 drives, are m.2 drives more reliable than the regular ssd?

[Ronski]

I doubt there's much difference, same set of technologies just different packaging and data interface.

I have a couple of Intel X-25M 80GB SSD's still in use, one in my PfSense router and the other as a secondary drive at work, both purchased in December 2009.

[Chrysalis]

if anything m.2 reduces reliability as they run hotter.  As ronski said its likely similar nand chips been used.

[sevenlayermuddle]

My money’s on the Sata cable being the problem.

You might think that a cable lying undisturbed, providing it worked to begin with, would continue to work.   But my own experience is to the contrary, I have known more than one apparently good Sata cables to mysteriously degrade over time, giving rise to prolific errors after a while.

Good luck, hope I’m right.

[parkdale]

I think it would Sata cable as well having experienced a couple in the past mainly due to bad contacts, the other is using removable drive bays had a couple in the past that failed after a few years giving intermittent results but taking the affected drives out and connecting straight to to mother board solved the problem...

[banger]

How old is the SSD Chrys?

[Chrysalis]

older than 2014 when the 840 was released.

its used 6% of its rated erase cycles.  (sorry isnt under 5% as I thought).

However there is what I learnt a set of nand where certian system data is held on the ssd that cannot be moved around for wear levelling and these cells dont show in the erase cycles stats, so its possible if the ssd is about to die this is the reason.

The sata cable is plausible, it was removed and reused when the board and cpu got swapped out a couple of weeks ago, and then repeatedly swapped in and out with another ssd as I was doing some bare metal windows stuff that I used another ssd to boot from.  It now has a brand new cable and the new cable also has a clip whilst the old one didnt.

[tiffy]

I wonder if there is a difference in ssd quality with the sata ssd's and these m.2 drives, are m.2 drives more reliable than the regular ssd?

Believe the hardware technology is the same as Ronski has said so should not be any difference in life prediction.

I have just incorporated a WD Black M.2 NVMe, 500 Gb. SSD drive into a new desktop PC build running Win 10, the data transfer speed is very impressive, very close to 3500Mb./sec. read and marginally less write speed, (large file transfer) close to 6 times faster than SATA 3 interface, certainly well worth the cost difference from a M.2 SATA SSD drive provided the hardware supports the interface.

I'am certainly hoping the SSD technology is durable and reliable, makes so much difference running Windows or I would imagine any operating system on SSD, however, I still religiously back up everything, including a SSD drive image to HD on a very regular basis, all hardware has a finite life and will eventually fail.

I upgraded my current desktop PC with a 3.5" 500 Gb. Samsung SATA SSD over a year ago, a Pentium i5 running Win 8.1, the difference was amazing, complete new lease of life even at SATA 3 data transfer rates, could not go back to operating system on a mechanical HD, certainly not with Windows.

[j0hn]

I've had about 10 SSD's in the last 7-8 years.
2 have died, a couple given away or sold, and I have 6 left still working.

My 1st was an OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB and still works as the boot drive in an old laptop.
My OCZ Vertex 3 120GB drive is also still going strong.

My 2 failures were an OCZ ARC 100 240GB and a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB.
The ARC 100 was nearly 3 years old but I'd hammered the drive pretty hard.
The Samsung 850 Pro was only 12 months 2 weeks old and wasn't even filled once.

OCZ (Toshiba) sent me a new ARC 100 with double the capacity (480GB) without asking a single question or requesting the old drive be returned. It arrived the next day.

Samsungs support on the 850 Pro was woeful, even insisting I took a picture of the drive to show where it was broken??? you what Samsung? it has no moving parts.
Over 3 weeks after 1st contacting them they finally replaced the drive.
For what was at the time 1 of the best consumer SATA SSD's I was left very disappointed.

I have a Samsung SM951 256GB NVME drive as my current boot drive. It has never missed a beat.

I have 3 Crucial SSD's that have never missed a beat either.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I have had two dead SSDs.

1x Corsair F60 (died in storage, just wasn't detected when I tried to power it up)
1x Sandisk Ultra (also died while powered off but just overnight)

Its a shame you can't practically recover any NAND chips that are still functional as I believe its as mentioned above, the firmware NAND failed but the storage NAND is probably fine.

I also had a drive seemingly fail on a server at a friends house, swapped it for a new SSD and the same UDMA errors.  Pretty sure that's either the caddy or cable that is faulty.  I haven't had a chance to fix it and its now offline, kinda assuming the errors has corrupted the drive again so during an update its failed to reboot.

[Chunkers]

I have had 3 SSD's fail, 2 of them Corsairs and one Samsung - they were all replaced under warranty.  One of my current Corsairs behaves weirdly on boot up and is sometimes not recognised.  Given I have a lot more Samsungs than Corsairs I am steering clear of Corsair nowadays.

Ironically (it seems to me) the little first generation 64 / 128 Gb ones I bought when they first came out are all going strong after quite a few years, it seems to be the later generation 256 and 512 Gb ones which have failed on me.

C

[Alex Atkin UK]

That's certainly curious as I was under the impression its the first generation ones that are particularly dodgy as they used Sandforce controllers that compress the data and were generally just flaky.

I still have one such SSD working that I believe is prone to fail, an OCZ Agility 3, so its just in my backup laptop.