[kwlug-disc] SSD Failure Symptoms and Recovering Data?

Thu Nov 8 10:44:40 EST 2018

Lori, is right: SSD and NVMe prices are really good right now.  And Black
Friday is just around the corner so keep an eye out for sales.

I'm a big fan of M.2 drives right on the motherboard.  My main desktop has
two slots, currently occupied by a Crucial 1TB M.2 and the other a Crucial
512GB M.2.  My Intel NUC has a 500GB nvme drive.  And much to my surprise,
my (maybe) six years old Lenovo laptop came with a 16GB M.2 which, at the
time when I bought it I thought it was a soldered-on chip so I never
bothered with it.  When I recently found out that it was an M.2 I
immediately swapped it out for a 500GB Samsung SSD 860.  The laptop is
running way faster now on the SSD instead of the 5400rpm HDD.

The M.2's are so much easier to work with (hardware-wise) as you don't have
to muck around with cables or power supplies or docking bays or whatever.
You just need one tiny screw.  Word of advice, though, the M.2's are often
mounted at a bit of an angle, which gives them a bit of a spring effect, so
be sure to hold it down with your thumb before you loosen the screw or you
will get to spend the next four hours on your hands and knees looking for
said screw...  Trust me, I know!

Sorry, Khalid, if my rant on M.2 doesn't help you with your older laptop,
but it's definitely something to keep in mind when you're ready to buy a
new one.

On Thu, 8 Nov 2018 at 10:20, L.D. Paniak <ldpaniak at fourpisolutions.com>
wrote:

> The prices at Newegg for Samsung SSDs are quite amazing:
> https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16820147669
> 2TB SSD for $500?
>
> Similarly for NVMe flash:
> https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16820147691
>
> Maybe the home all-flash array is not that far off after all!
>
> -Lori
>
>
> On 11/8/18 09:43, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
>
> Ditto on the EVOs..  pretty solid drives.  I've had a few, with no issues.
>
>
>
> On Thu, 8 Nov 2018 at 09:41, Benjamin Tompkins <bjtompkins at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I agree with Ron on this one.  You pretty much can't go wrong with any of
>> the Samsung EVO/PRO SSDs.  I personally have a couple of the 850 and 960s
>> in use at home.
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 9:35 AM Ron Singh <ronsingh149 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Sorry to hear of your SSD woes Khalid, must be a ton of read retries
>>> causing the slow copy?
>>>
>>> We use a ton of Samsung 860 Pro and EVO in my world for
>>> laptops/workstations and cache devices on NAS units. The 860 PRO with it's
>>> LMC tech is likely overkill for an end-user situation and the prices are
>>> brutal.
>>>
>>> The 860 EVO is the perfect blend of decent pricing and unparalleled
>>> reliability compared to it's peers in the TLC realm.
>>>
>>> We have used Intel, Sandisk, Crucial/Micron, and Samsung since about
>>> 2009 and the Samsung are the ones holding up best, only about 4-5 failures
>>> in 9 years within a population of at least 3000 units in play. The Intel
>>> units were the worse.
>>>
>>> The prices online at at CC are remarkably low for Samsung and a fair
>>> number of SSDs out there, hard to go wrong.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Ron Singh
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 11:25 PM Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> So, the excepted happened and a laptop with an SSD failed.
>>>>
>>>> The laptop itself is OK, despite its age, but the SSD (added in the
>>>> past few years), failed.
>>>> First, it was a SMART error like this:
>>>>
>>>> Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors
>>>>
>>>> Device info:
>>>> HP SSD S700 120GB, S/N:xxxx, FW:Q0330B1, 120 GB
>>>>
>>>> Then it was 3 sectors, and yesterday it was 33 sectors.
>>>>
>>>> I started copying the data off of the SSD to an external USB disk. It
>>>> is working, but it is very slow.
>>>> The shell command is slow when I press tab for command completion. Most
>>>> commands time out (systemd reports several timeouts). The disk is mounted
>>>> read only.
>>>>
>>>> The copying is now a day and a half for a only a few tens of GB. The
>>>> target disk flickers once every minute or so.
>>>>
>>>> Why is this copying too slow?
>>>>
>>>> Another question is what replacement SSD should I get. Ron Singh posted
>>>> a while back about Samsung EVO 860, which are still on sale at Canada
>>>> Computers and BestBuy (ends tomorrow), e.g.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=179_1229_1088&item_id=120021
>>>>
>>>> Are these still a good value? Or are there alternatives?
>>>> --
>>>> Khalid M. Baheyeldin
>>>> 2bits.com, Inc.
>>>> Fast Reliable Drupal
>>>> Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
>>>> Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger W.Dijkstra
>>>> Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- anonymous
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> kwlug-disc mailing list
>>>> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
>>>> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> kwlug-disc mailing list
>>> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
>>> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> kwlug-disc mailing list
>> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
>> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing listkwlug-disc at kwlug.orghttp://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing list
> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/attachments/20181108/5ff32183/attachment.htm>