On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Mike Small <[email protected]> wrote: > Kent Borg <[email protected]> writes: >> Go ahead and trust SSDs on par with HDDs. I am going to hold off until >> I see it, let the young industry grow up a lot more. > > Is the failure mode for SSDs different? It happened that a newish > Windows 7 machine I use at work ran out of memory and crashed without > syncing to disk one day last year. I was surprised to find that the SSD > on the machine had huge numbers of corrupt blocks across many source > files and system dlls (but somehow it limped along to boot and be > somewhat useable). The D: drive was a HDD and had no corruption at > all. > > Perhaps this is off topic since it was a software/OS (and not one most > here care about I assume, I know I don't)/file system "failure" not a > hardware failure. But it was very surprising to me. From experience at > home my expectation from unexpected shutdowns is just a long fsck at > next start up, at worst some file and directory structure that was > recently written being lost or corrupted. This was all over the place, > stuff that would have been opened for read and not written to > recently. I don't get it.
Guessing here.... 1. SSDs are constantly moving data around in order to do wear leveling. 2. Not all SSDs have batteries/super capacitors to finish those activities if power is lost. If the windows system was power cycled in such a way that the SSD wasn't warned, it might lose things. Disk drives can have similar issues if they are caching writes, but typically there is less data and I think that some of them pull energy from the rotation of the platters to finish up. Or at least I seem to recall hearing about that once. Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
