[kwlug-disc] OT: SSD disks?

[Paul Nijjar]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 02:24:45PM -0500, Chris Irwin wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Chris Irwin <chris at chrisirwin.ca> wrote:
> 
> > Tech Report did an SSD endurance experiment with a few popular SSDs until
> > they all failed. Spoiler: Don't buy
> >
> 
> Spoiler: No matter how well you proof-read, you'll find a typo as you press
> send.
> 
> "Don't buy Samsung TLC drives.", was the rest of that sentence.
> 

Oops. So much for my purchasing advice (and my purchasing strategy,
for that matter). I still wonder whether Samsung TLC drives are better
or worse than other TLC drives, though (and how hard it is to tell
what drives are TLC and what are MLC). Were the drives in this test
considered more reliable than picking an arbitrary drive, or are they
middle-of-the-road?

A more charitable spoiler might be "Don't buy any three-state TLC
drive, and only get two state MLC drives instead." 


I found one terrifying paragraph in the article: 

----

The drive's media wear indicator ran out shortly after 700TB,
signaling that the NAND's write tolerance had been exceeded. Intel
doesn't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series
is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when
the power is cycled. 
----

Um.. what? In what world is bricking a drive after a power cycle an
acceptable failure mode? Read-only I can understand. But bricking?


- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org