Re:The Shingled magnetic recording NAS debacle
by bcrl on Thursday May 28, 2020 @06:29PM
(#23343661)
If I were buying SSDs, HP is not at the top of my list of well known SSD vendors that have an excellent data integrity record, probably owing to an experience many years ago with HP branded MegaRAIDs that only had a known data corruptor in the HP "blessed" firmware.
My personal theory is that consumer gear tends to get better tested over the long run since millions of units out in the field will result in a lot of weird corner cases actually happening. The electrical engineers I know love it when their products are in high volume production, as it makes it a lot easier to find patterns and the underlying causes of failures. In contrast, low volume niche products will always have lurking bugs deep in obscure corners that haven't been exercised.
They're still a problem. HP had two separate instances of branded SSDs fail when the lifetime counter rolled over (I guess they didn't test everything the first time).
My experience with running around 10k SSDs and spinning drives in a datacenter was that spinning drives would fail more often, but would provide clear warning signs if you check SMART stats regularly, providing opportunity to replace failing drives without losing redundancy if your storage systems are flexible. SSDs would fail significantly less often, but there would rarely be a warning --- disks would just disappear, never to be seen again. Our use was relatively low writes, we weren't anywhere near the lifetime write counts.
Some SSDs would really tank performance if they declared bad sectors, while they were moving things around, host driven I/O was very slow. I don't remember which brand that was.