I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)!

Posted by: mlord

I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 15/11/2012 12:04

My buddy wanted a small, cheap SSD for the boot/system drive in his 24/7 Mythtv box. He uses mechanical drives for storing the actual recordings and videos, so this drive would just hold the boot files, programs etc, and mysql database. Plus daily backups of the mysql database.

So I found him one from the pile here, a demo unit I received from the first generation of Indilinx based drives: OCZ Vertex 60GB, with MLC flash. About four (?) years old, formerly used in my own Mythtv box for the same purpose.

A month later, my buddy rings up in a panic: dead!

Turns out I made a tiny error setting up the crontab entry for the mysql backups.. rather than once a day, it was doing them once a minute.. oops.

That's at least 150MBytes of churn, more likely 500MBytes with mysql inefficiencies, once a minute, continuously for about 35 days. 7.5TB - 25TB. On top of "normal" system activity.

So, if you want to kill a small, used SSD, there's a good recipe!
Posted by: mlord

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 15/11/2012 12:13

On the plus side, despite the incredible amount of I/O this generated, neither of us actually noticed any kind of slowdown due to all of that I/O. SSDs rule!

I also have a corporate client who uses lots and lots of mechanical drives in some Big Iron. They once had a similar issue, with an operating system updating the filesystem "superblock" too often. Wore away the oxide coatings on that region of the drives!
Posted by: mlord

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 15/11/2012 12:16

Originally Posted By: mlord
That's at least 150MBytes of churn, more likely 500MBytes with mysql inefficiencies, once a minute, continuously for about 35 days. 7.5TB - 25TB. On top of "normal" system activity.

Thinking about this a little more, I suppose those numbers get doubled again due to the filesystem journalling.. and that's all before the write-amplification factor of the SSD itself.
Posted by: tfabris

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 15/11/2012 18:30

Is there hope for inventing solid state storage technology that doesn't have a re-use limit for each bit?
Posted by: mlord

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 15/11/2012 21:24

Sure there's hope. But right now it's already a lot better than mechanical media for nearly all purposes.

I suspect the problem was overheating more than wearing out the flash, but dunno.. totally dead now. smile
Posted by: Robotic

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 16/11/2012 17:08

Wow, that's pretty impressive!
Posted by: presslab

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 16/11/2012 20:08

Originally Posted By: tfabris
Is there hope for inventing solid state storage technology that doesn't have a re-use limit for each bit?


Yes, ST-MRAM is coming in the next year, parts sampling now. ST-MRAM is basically non-volatile DDR3, the holy grail. Density is small now, but it will increase in time.

http://www.mram-info.com/everspin-offici...-available-2013
Posted by: tfabris

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 17/11/2012 02:17

Coooooooool.
Posted by: Taym

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 20/11/2012 18:34

Holy Grail indeed. Thanks for the link.
Posted by: mlord

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 24/11/2012 18:12

Originally Posted By: mlord
I suspect the problem was overheating more than wearing out the flash, but dunno.. totally dead now. smile

Or perhaps not.

I've dug out my old notes from back when this SSD was state of the art. After attaching a jumper to the "factory" pins, it came up in "factory mode". A bit of searching around, and I found the latest v1.7 "destructive firmware update" for the unit, which works in "factory mode".

Update applied, drive is now alive again.
It was running v1.6 before the crash, now has v1.7 on it.
Dunno what the differences are.

I don't expect a huge amount of life is left in the drive, but it's probably still got 20-30% in it yet.

Cheers
Posted by: peter

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 24/11/2012 19:55

Originally Posted By: mlord
Update applied, drive is now alive again.
It was running v1.6 before the crash, now has v1.7 on it.
Dunno what the differences are.

Personally, I'd want to see a changelog entry that says "Fixed: drive randomly drops dead" before putting that unit back into use...

Peter
Posted by: mlord

Re: I managed to fry a Solid-State Drive (SSD)! - 04/12/2012 01:35

Mmm.. apparently my problem was I didn't get the SSD flash memory hot enough when trying to fry it. smile