SSD reliability

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2022 at 13:48, J. Paul Bissonnette <jpaulb at eastlink.ca> wrote:

> Can you due a smartmon test on the desk?
> Short: sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sdX
> or
> Long: sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdX

TBH I have found SMART not all that reliable on spinning hard disks,
but I think its tests are not much help at all on SSDs.

It's like journaling filesystems. They were designed for spinning
disks, where some blocks occasionally stop working. Journaling helps
you protect from failures causes when writes do not write the data.

SSDs do not fail like that. They give general errors for a while and
then die completely, all at once. And they wear out with repeated
write cycles.

So journalling file systems don't help recover from the kind of errors
that occur on SSDs, but they _do_ cause additional writes and
therefore cause SSDs to fail earlier.

The UNIX world is very very slow at adapting to technological changes...


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