Even though it’s flash memory under the hood, SSDs are supposed to have wear-levelling algorithms baked into the firmware so that they function like a normal ATA HDD. I know of someone else who has deployed the Kingston SSDs into Windows XP machines (a *recommended* use case by Kingston), where there is no possibility of modifying mount options, and all of his Kingston SSDs have now failed, too. (For what it’s worth, 3M’s SSDs are also not recommended, for the same reason.)
It appears that lower-price SSD manufacturers don’t do much testing of their gear to validate expected service life. Either that, or their expectations of what ‘normal’ disk I/O patterns are doesn’t match reality. So far, the Intel SSDs appear to be the most reliable in general-purpose use (i.e. HDD replacement), but you pay a substantial premium: perhaps in the SSD world, you really do get what you pay for? Worth noting that there is a reasonably-complete reference chart of which vendor uses which parts at <http://pcper.com/ssd-decoder> http://pcper.com/ssd-decoder. Note that some newer Kingston models use Intel controllers, which should help – *IF* Kingston ever gets around to releasing firmware updates! (Or if the Intel f/w updates work on Kingston drives – not tested.) The Sandforce controllers seem to generally have decent service life combined with decent performance. FreeBSD 8.2 (apparently) fully supports TRIM for UFS filesystems, so using SSDs in long-life applications should become a more viable option if you’re on an 8.2 or newer kernel. (IIRC, pfsense2.0 is based on 8.1, while 2.1 is to be based on 9.x.) It looks like ad(4) supports BIO_DELETE in 8.1-Release (and therefore pfSense 2.0), but you have to use newfs(8) to make that happen… not exactly suitable for daily use! That means that during installation of pfSense 2.0, your SSD should release all blocks, which will still help somewhat. -Adam Thompson <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] (204) 291-7950 - direct (204) 489-6515 - fax From: Bao Ha [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2011 11:36 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [pfSense Support] Kingston SSD filesystem corruption On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Tim Dickson <[email protected]> wrote: > About a year ago, I switched to running the full pfSense 2.0 (beta something > at the time) on a Kingston SS100S2/8G embedded SSD. I installed the 30G version in 12 systems, all of which failed within 6 months. I moved to Intel 320s and/or WD Greens (depending on budget of the site) so we'll see how they hold up. I also had the 64G version running Untangle systems which failed as well... in short I would not recommend the Kingston SSDs at all... it's been a major pain having to swap them all out of live systems. SSD is just flash memory. You will need to mount the filesystem with sync and noatime. -- Best Regards. Bao C. Ha Hacom - Embedded Systems and Appliances http://www.hacom.net voice: (714) 564-9932
