Posted on 09/16/2016 10:13:55 PM PDT by djf
Hi everyone, I have a question about SAN disks, which is a standard electronic disk. I have two of them, one is 128GB and the other is 240GB.
Many sites report that electronic media do have a limited number of writes/reads before they quit.
I have never been able to push one of my drives to fail, and don't really want to destroy something on purpose. But I am intensely curious what happens when they do fail.
Is it smart enough to report to the OS (operating system) that there has been a track failure? Will the OS keep operating, and a re-write attempted? Does anyone at all have experience with this?
Thanks in advance!
Writes Diana near forever, as far as I know but, it should be booted down every 10 to keep the memory from bleeding.
I have two of them.
Well that's easy to explain. You see, what will happen is
Memory devices tend to fail when they are the sole source of data and is not backed up anywhere else. What happens, is that the owner goes into a rage and screams wildly because the data is too valuable to lose.
Back up the data periodically to an external hard drive. The SAN disk then will not fail because it knows the data is saved elsewhere.
For starters San Disc is a company...your presentation not with standing. From the sizes I am assuming that these are flash drives. Is that correct?
They are both SATA attached 2.5 in drives attached to my desktops.
Both desktops have a regular SATA hard drive as the primary device and these devices are secondary.
I will say this much: they are FAST!!!! Woo Woo!!
By the way, I did have a SAN disk fail. A SanDisk SDSSDX240GG25, 240GB model. It stopped mounting, and the partition was unreadable and would not mount. The identifier for the partition changed to all “FF”. Luckily, I had cloned the drive elsewhere so I had a backup. Had to reformat it. Don’t know what the cause was, but I stopped using it as a primary SSD and use it for non-critical data, and switched to other brands of SSD.
So with that storage they must be older....how old are they?
See post 7 that is a good description
Buy an external hard drive. They hook up very easily. You just plug it in a USB port. They are reasonably priced, and often on sale. They have 1,000 GBs, 2k GBs, 3. whatever you need. Check Best Buy for sales.
I am using SAN DISK SSDs as my Boot drive in four of my machines at home. In fact, my master has 8 regular hard drives along with 6 SSDs, a little more than 25 TB total.
I have never had any problem with any SSD yet. My HTPC has the same number of hard drives but only 1 SSD for the boot drive. Every hard drive is replicated (exactly the same content wise) on both machines.
From what I’ve read, when a SSD fails, except for a total failure of the controller, it usually only fails with a write due to excessive writes being performed for a long time. Even when it can’t find good space to write new data, all previously written data remains readable.
One should never do a REGULAR defrag on a SSD but should us a program such as Perfect Disk if their operating is incapable of fully utilizing the TRIM command.
I highly recommend Perfect Disk even though there are other products available which work as well. It is best to let your operating system (OS) and motherboard handle the SSD defrag if they are capable.
Well I picked them both up from Amazon, so I would guess they are from 2010-2014
I do have hard drive backups from them so all the data is safe. Actually I only in the last few days got one of the devices to be bootable.
But Windows XP doesn’t have something called the TRIM command, so I am unsure about using them forever like I would a regular hard drive.
Xlent response. Very informative, gives me almost all I need.
Thanks!
My opinion is that SSD drives are best used for operating systems, and are not for your files. Yes, I understand the idea of backups. But you don’t want the SSD drive to fail in the middle of saving an important file.
The ideal setup:
1. Two SSD drives, or one internal SSD and one external. One has the operating system, and the second SSD is used to mirror the first on regular invervals. That is your backup. NO personal files go on either of these two drives.
2. Internal or external standard SATA drives — These are for your data. One is a mirror of the primary drive. The other is used only for routine backups.
3. External drives you routinely use to back up everything and then store in another location. Fires and tornadoes happen.
You are very welcome, Dan
I use my SSD (I think this is what you are talking about) as my boot and (some) programs drive, and keep most data, documents, and even programs that run fast enough on a HDD, on an internal 500 GB HDD. Then I back up (probably not as often as I should) to an external HDD). To keep things “really quick” and ease the swap file burden (writes) on the SSD, I have 10 GB of RAM on my primary desktop machine.
If you can use an external e-SATA or USB 3.0 HDD (or 2), the data drive need not even be internal, depending on how much speed you need.
I’ve read that flash drives (sticks and cards) and SSD’s are expected to jump considerably in capacity vs. price without reliability deterioration, soon, due to new Samsung tech coming onto the market. 2TB for $100 or so...?
http://mp3support.sandisk.com/SSD_toolkit/ssdtoolkit_installer.exe
It will perform a S.M.A.R.T analysis of the SSD.
In general, you want to limit writes to SSDs, but they typically last a very long time before failure.
Contrary to what is posted above, you will not have the hard drive simply die and need to be reformatted when it reaches its end of useful life. That is a symptom of shutdown failure, or an OS bug or other hardware failure and is not a sign of age. That symptom can be seen with any drive, and contrary to what is posted above, reformatting the drive will certainly overcome sector or other OS recovery failures, and it would allow you to continue to use the drive for those types of errors. But it WILL NOT BUY YOU ANY EXTRA TIME WHEN THE DRIVE REACHES ITS END OF LIFE.
Age is not the issue with an SSD. The issue is that an SSD has a limited number of writes. The drives do NOT generally degrade with reads.
SSD's support S.M.A.R.T. hard drive technology, just as platter drives do. [Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. At least, I don't know of any that don't have this feature. You shouldn't buy a drive that doesn't.] So, you can use one of the many freeware available products to check S.M.A.R.T status. Windows® also reports S.M.A.R.T. analysis when a drive is failing, as does Linux.
What happens when you start to reach the end of useable life with an SSD is EXACTLY the same thing that happens with a platter drive. Over time, sectors will become unwritable. The drive hardware will relocate these unwritable sectors somewhere else on the drive. Just as with a platter drive, you'll eventually reach a point when bad sectors can no longer be relocated. When that happens you must replace the drive.
If you want to be on top of this before you start seeing S.M.A.R.T. errors, which is a good idea, see if your manufacturer provides an SSD diagnostic program (these usually rely on S.M.A.R.T. as well as manufacture specific firmware.) These usually come with the drive but might be available online. Those utilities will usually tell you the estimated remaining life of a drive. To be honest, I've never run out of life on any of my SSD's, and some of them are more than five years old.
Bottom line with any drive: assume it is going to fail, because it is. Take regular backups and verify them as part of the back-up process.
I fully agree with you. Not only do I use Acronis true image to back up my boot drive to a hard drive, that backup is also copied to my HTPC ensuring that I have two copies of each backup.
I also RESTORE that Backup to ONE SSD with NO drive letter thereby protecting it from Virus or hackers on my main machine. If my boot drive fails, I can simply change my motherboards boot drive priority to use that SSD as my primary boot drive and when I reboot it becomes my new “C” drive with the old “C” drive being hidden but available using Disk Management to make it visible.
Basically, my “C’ drive is my boot drive, my “D” drive contains all my system sources as well as my app sources and data backup. My large multi TB hard drives, E,F,G,H,I, and J contain various audio and video files while my “W” drive contains all the backups from my four machines.
Even regular hard drives fail. The solid state drives are much more reliable.
My concern would be were they previously used. If so you have no history as to how they were used or scrubbed. . If they are new, fresh out of the box they were overstock and sold off because newer devices were being produced. If new out of the box they will ladt longer than you hard drive
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