Has your solid state drive reached it's expiration date?

[gunug]

I can't say that I ever bought an HP Solid State Drive (or even knew they existed) but apparently some made 9 years ago are about to expire!

YOUR DRIVE IS GOOD FOR ABOUT 3 YEARS AND 9 MONTHS
Sometimes though even developers that should know better get it wrong, and this week has brought an unfortunate example for the enterprise wing of the hardware giant HP. Their manufacturer has notified them that certain models of solid-state disk drives supplied in enterprise storage systems contain an unfortunate bug, in which they stop working after 32,768 hours of uptime. That’s a familiar number to anyone working with base-2 numbers and hints at a 16-bit signed integer in use to log the hours of uptime. When it rolls over the value will then be negative and, rather than the drive believing itself to be in a renewed flush of youth, it will instead stop working.

Egg on the faces of the storage company then, and an urgently-released patch. We suspect that if you own a stack of these drives you will already know about the issue and be nervously pacing the racks of your data centre.

https://hackaday.com/2019/12/10/patch-or-your-solid-state-drives-roll-over-and-die/

[Xairbusdriver]

Not sure whose math is off. There are 8,760 hours in a 365 day year. A counter would reach 32,768 in 3.740639 years. The "3 years and 9 months" is very close to that. But, if the drives have been running since they were bought "9 years" ago, they are well past the 'replace by' date by a factor of ~2.4. Perhaps they were intended to be used 8 hours a day, weekdays only and all holidays off?

[jchuzi]

I came across this Micromat utility: Lifespan, which could aid those who have SSDs. I have not tried it myself, but in my experience, Micromat products have been very good.

[Xairbusdriver]

Most of the concerns I've read about are related to the 'life-time' of the electronic 'switches' for storing the '+/-', 'ON/OFF' data. seems these things, while orders of magnitude faster than regular RAM, are also prone to lose their capacity to change states. Like most technologies, there are often unknown problems that only time and use/testing demonstrates. I surely do appreciate the speed of the SSD in my iMac!! Hope Apple (or whoever built those parts) is using 64 bit numbers!!

[Highmac]

One concern I have with SSDs is whether you get any warning of impending failure. "Traditional" HDDs usually start making warning noises, giving you a chance to rescue the data. The SSD is silent and the only clue it's working is the light.


Has anybody had one fail and did you get any clue it was on its way out?

[Xairbusdriver]

the only clue it's working is the light

Actually, the light sends the message in Morse code, but remember it is in hexadecimal! It's all in the manual that is Asian translated into "English" by retired African hackers with a southern accent.

[jchuzi]

One concern I have with SSDs is whether you get any warning of impending failure. "Traditional" HDDs usually start making warning noises, giving you a chance to rescue the data. The SSD is silent and the only clue it's working is the light.


Has anybody had one fail and did you get any clue it was on its way out?

I had an OWC Mercury Extreme fail but the drive itself did not give any warning. I was apprised of it by Checkmate. Some time before that warning (and it may have been a year of more), the drive (external) disappeared from the desktop. Disk Utility could not find it but Disk Warrior saw it and repaired it. I don't know how damaged it was in the interval between Checkmate's warning and DW's repair.

[jwboyd]

Sounds like another good reason for redundant backup drives. I have three, one being an SSD.

[jchuzi]

Sounds like another good reason for redundant backup drives. I have three, one being an SSD.

I have three SSD clones plus one HDD dedicated to Time Machine. Because of the problem of re-writing too many times to SSDs, I opted to keep TM as an HDD.