Note: the worn drives were very worn. 128GB drive with 280TB written is ~2400 cycles. >5x it's 480x rating!<p>Even though it's a cheap drive, it's rated endurance wasn't really that low. 600 cycles (1200TBW/2TB) is pretty common for consumer SSD: that's higher than 480x but not vastly higher.<p>Glad folks are chiming in with the temperature sensitivity notes. I have parts coming in for a much bigger home-cloud system, and was planning on putting it in the attic. But it's often >110°F in the summer up there! I don't know how much of a difference that would make, given that the system will be on 24/7; some folks seem to say having it powered on should be enough, others note that usually it's during read that cells are refreshed.<p>Doing an annual dd if=/nvme0n1 of=/dev/zero bs=$((1024*1024)) hadn't been the plan, but maybe it needs to be!
For long term storage, prefer hard drives (careful about CMR vs SMR)<p>If you have specific random IO high performance needs, you can either<p>- get a SLC drive like <a href="https://news.solidigm.com/en-WW/230095-introducing-the-solidigm-d7-p5810-an-ultra-fast-slc-ssd-for-write-intensive-workloads" rel="nofollow">https://news.solidigm.com/en-WW/230095-introducing-the-solid...</a><p>- make one yourself by hacking the firmware: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578</a><p>Be careful when you use something "exotic", and do not trust drives that are too recent to be fully tested: I learned my lesson for M2 2230 drives <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/17pztue/warning_you_may_want_to_avoid_some_western/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/17pztue/warning_you_ma...</a> which seems validated by the large numbers of similar experiences like <a href="https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793">https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793</a>
Discussion on the original source: (20 points, 3 days ago, 5 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43702193">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43702193</a><p>Related: <i>SSD as Long Term Storage Testing</i> (132 points, 2023, 101 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35382252">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35382252</a>
This is a known issue. You have to power up your SSDs (and flash cards, which are based on even more flimsy/cost optimized version of the same tech) every now and then for them to keep data. SSDs are not suitable for long term cold storage or archiving. Corollary: don't lose that recovery passphrase you've printed out for your hardware crypto key, the flash memory in it is also not eternal.
I would never buy a no-name SSD. Did it once long ago and got bit, wrote a program to sequentially write a pseudorandom sequence across the whole volume then read back and verify, and proved all 8 Pacer SSD's I had suffered corruption.
I wonder how ssd endurance is effected - if at all , by storage temperature. I’m thinking if it was kept at 3 degrees or even colder like frozen. Since chemical reactions proceed slower with a lower temperature. Photographic negatives can have deterioration greatly slowed if stored at some low temperatures. Would need to take steps to avoid condensation. … Would be interesting to know for hard drives to ….
I mean, this reads as I expected it to: SSDs as cold storage are a risky gamble, and the longer the drive sits unpowered (and the more use it sees over its life), the less reliable it becomes.<p>Man, I’d (figuratively) kill for a startup to build a prosumer-friendly LTO drive. I don’t have anywhere near the hardware expertise myself, but I’d gladly plunk down the dosh for a drive if they weren’t <i>thousands of dollars</i>. Prosumers and enthusiasts deserve shelf-stable backup solutions at affordable rates.
Endurance is proportional to programming temperature. In the video, when all four SSDs are installed at once, the composite device temperature ranges over 12º. This should be expected to influence the outcomes.
Not surprsing. Flash is for hot/warm storage, not for cold storage, but using literal bottom of the bargin-bin barrel no-name drives that are already highly worn really doesn't tell us anything. Even if these were new or in powered on systems for their whole life, I wouldn't have high confidence in their data retention, reliability or performance quite frankly. Granted, there is something to be said about using budget/used drives en masse and brute forcing your way to reliability/performance/capacity on a budget through shear scale, but that requires some finesse and understanding of storage array concepts, best-practices, systems and software. By no means beyond the skills of an average homelaber/HN reader if you're willing to spend a few hours of research, but importantly you would want to evaluate them as an array/bulk, not individually in that instance, else you lose context. That also typically requires a total monetary investment beyond what most homelabbers/consumers/prosumers are willing to invest even if the end-of-the-day TB/$ ratio ends up quite competitive.<p>There's also many <i>many</i> types of flash drives (well beyond just MLC/TLC/QLC), and there's a <i>huge</i> difference between no names, white labels, and budget ADATA's and the like, and an actual proper high end/enterprise SSD (and a whole spectrum in between). And No, 990/9100 Pro's from Samsung and other similar prosumer drives are <i>not</i> high end flash. Good enough for home gamers and most prosumers, absolutely! They would also likely yield significant improvements vs these levens in OP. I'm not trying to say those prosumer drives are <i>bad</i> drives. They aren't (The levens though, even new in box, absolutely are).<p>I'm merely saying that a small sample of some of the worst drives you can buy that are already beyond their stated wear and tear is frankly a poor sample to derive any real informed opinion on flash's potential or abilities. TL;DR: This really doesn't tell us much other than "bad flash is bad flash".