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Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?
IainB:
^So what's your take on the programs output, should he draw three, hold, or fold?
-Stoic Joker (August 02, 2012, 01:53 PM)
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Hahaha. Yes, maybe. ;)
Renegade:
Also, a quick mention on SSDs... back up those things even more vigilantly than mechanical drives. Yes, in theory those flash cells should wear out gracefully, and even the MLC variants should last quite a bit longer under normal use than a mechanical disk. Funny thing is, though, that they don't. Or rather, the flash cells don't wear out, but either the firmware goes into retardo-mode (known to happen frequently with SandForce based drives), or other parts of the electronics just go frizzle. And then you're SOL. Really, bigtime SOL. At least with mechanical drives, you can send them off to data recovery services if the data was important enough... much less likely to be able to do that with SSDs, especially with the ones that have hardware encryption.
Me and a classmate had our Vertex2 SSDs die a few weeks apart, after... what, a month or so use? And my Intel X25-E (their ENTERPRISE SLC-based drive) died last month, after a few years of non-intensive use... I'm sure the SLC cells would have several years lifetime left, so it's probably some electronics that went fizzle. Scary that an enterprise drive dies like that :-(
-f0dder (August 02, 2012, 03:12 PM)
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I did some work for Samsung Semiconductor a while back, and they listed their SSDs as 1~2 million hours MTBF, with the enterprise class drives at 2 million hours. Other manufacturers that I'd checked had mostly 1~1.5 MH MTBF (IIRC). I'd also read in several places about people having SSDs die suddenly within a year. Considering there are only 8,760 hours in a year, it really has to make you question things a bit. 1 year is about 0.5% of the rated life. Seems like some seriously bizarre distributions (as in standard deviations and normal distribution) for the "mean". Perhaps MTBF is done with climate math? :P
I've got my SSD on real-time full backup, but I really would still hate to see it die either way. I just loathe setting up systems, and restoring is still the same thing to me.
TaoPhoenix:
Good to know. I'll probably wait until the drive actually does, but I'll step up the migration process from "3 years from tomorrow" to beginning to put the pieces in place.
4wd:
Other manufacturers that I'd checked had mostly 1~1.5 MH MTBF (IIRC). I'd also read in several places about people having SSDs die suddenly within a year. Considering there are only 8,760 hours in a year, it really has to make you question things a bit. 1 year is about 0.5% of the rated life.-Renegade (August 03, 2012, 12:21 AM)
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No, it makes perfect sense.
MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures
That means you need to start with at least one failure to have a time "between" failures - so you can be sure you have a useful SSD life of 1000000 hours before you need to get worried again.
:D
Renegade:
Other manufacturers that I'd checked had mostly 1~1.5 MH MTBF (IIRC). I'd also read in several places about people having SSDs die suddenly within a year. Considering there are only 8,760 hours in a year, it really has to make you question things a bit. 1 year is about 0.5% of the rated life.-Renegade (August 03, 2012, 12:21 AM)
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No, it makes perfect sense.
MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures
That means you need to start with at least one failure to have a time "between" failures - so you can be sure you have a useful SSD life of 1000000 hours before you need to get worried again.
:D
-4wd (August 03, 2012, 03:50 AM)
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So, just buy 2 then? :) Or 4 for mirrored raid? ;)
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