"Read only" after some fixed number of writes would be safer. But then the complaints would be "why can't they just allow me to write as much as I can, I have the backup somewhere anyway." Which is also a valid wish. So it would be the best to be able if user could select the mode.
I can easily see someone having their computer lock up / etc, restarting, and losing their data. As restarting is often one of the first debugging steps for so many things.
"If your SSD has stopped working and you cannot access the data, the best thing to do is to turn it off to prevent further damage." [1]
Maybe that advice needs to be reconsidered?
[1] http://www.payam.com.au/content_common/pg-ssd-data-recovery....
If you're the kind of person who can troubleshoot a faulty drive, then you're not the kind of person who should reboot as a first step towards debugging. Especially if you suspect a faulty drive.
How is that different from any other write the drive had experienced though?
Intel died after power cycle because of buggy Sandforce chip/firmware. Intel bullshit fairytale was post facto rationalization. There is NO UNIVERSE where bricking user product full of data is a good thing, especially if you promised read only failure mode in the documentation.
By doing that, that area will easily outlast the regular flash.
Also hope you never have a power outage or hard reset of any kind.
And as for power outages and hard resets, there's these nifty things known as capacitors. It only needs to last as long as is necessary to write the data to flash.
Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
In fact my personal advice is to plan to lose everything since your last backup. If you can't afford that risk, back up more often.
No disk technology is perfect nor instantly comparable. I consider this to be purely a 'value for money before it blows up' assessment. The results make me happy as I've been recommending and use 840 pros for a while now.
That's one of the things I look for in a hard disk - how does it act when it fails. A "good" failure is some bad sectors, but otherwise OK.
Without that the damage would have been piecemeal as sectors went bad, rather than watching a chip go poof and lose access to everything.
Of course, there are other solutions to this problem: sledgehammer, etc
And you could allow secure erase while still prohibiting normal writes. The cells aren't actually gone or unusable after all, just unreliable. A secure erase would work fine on them.
No, because they do this http://vxlabs.com/2012/12/22/ssds-with-usable-built-in-hardw...
Erase the AES key -> data is gone
One of the SSDs died a couple of weeks ago (unexpectedly Linux didn't fail safe properly, it fell over trying to read from the broken one and didn't seem to try read from the other instead, upon coming back up it ran from the good drive OK) and RAID saved my much hassle rebuilding from the previous night's backups.
The SSDs in my desktop box aren't RAIDed, nor in my laptop (two wouldn't fit), but I can easily survive either of those being out of action for a couple of days and may backup regime involving copies on the local file server and on remote hosts (fingers crossed) should mean nothing gets lost if they do die.
I've not found the failer rates of SSDs to be any different to spinning media - I don't trust important data to a single drive of either type.
I am NOT impressed with the behavior at end of life. In fact it makes it wary of using any SSD.
A bad SSD should go read only, and stay that way. Not self-brick, and make the data unrecoverable.