apt full-upgrade causes system lock-up

[Aaron Rainbolt]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 5:52 PM Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2 Jun 2022 17:30:16 -0500, Aaron Rainbolt <arraybolt3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >However, just from the data I see here, I'm even more led to believe
> >this is drive failure. Judging from your drive model and your data
> >written, your drive is supposed to sustain 300 terabytes written.
> >You've done 402 TB, so that drive isn't just past warranty, it's
> >probably just shy of fried, if not fried already. That would explain
> >the read-only state - the drive is likely about to die, and is trying
> >to preserve the data that's left before you lose it.
>
> The disk is a 500 GB PCIe SSD drive so there are no mechanical parts to wear
> out....

SSDs do wear out, but differently. In an SSD, all your data is stored
in a bunch of cells. Each cell essentially gets a bit burnt every time
you write to it. The cells can take a lot of damage in this fashion
before they finally can't reliably hold data any more, but after
enough writes, they get so burnt up they don't hold data right
anymore. When that happens, your SSD has to start using backup cells
to compensate for the loss. When your SSD runs out of backup cells,
the whole thing can no longer reliably hold data, and then interesting
things start to happen. Read-only mode is one of those interesting
things.

> The system is used to manage video files and writes about 6 GB of video data on
> disk every 24 hours, so by that reckoning it should have taken about 187 years
> to complete writing 402 TB of data.
> But the computer is only 2-3 years old, it has actually been powered on for
> 13259 hours = 1.5 years...
>
> I cannot see how this could happen at all. Something is not right here.

If you got your PC second-hand with an upgraded "new" drive, that
might be the problem. Perhaps the upgrader bought a supposedly new
drive off eBay not knowing any better. From what I've seen, "new" eBay
drives are all too often not new at all.

> And it is not writing anything else except whatever logs the Linux system
> produces....

Depending on your system, Linux might actually be writing a LOT of
logs, but not that many. Perhaps a hardware or software failure is
causing the logs to grow out of proportion, but you'd likely be able
to see a bunch of repeating data very close together if that were the
case. I'd guess you're either doing something more intensive than you
think on the system (maybe video data processing is creating temp
files, increasing the amount of writes to the disk?), or you got a
used drive.