[kwlug-disc] SMART for SSDs

[B.S.]

Thanks Khalid ... good info.

Just got through Lori's link, myself (thanks Lori, a good and entertaining read!). I noted the article says the average user won't write more than a few TB a year, and that even MLC SSDs should get 100's of TB of life. That would be decades. Rather reassuring. [Inferring inexpensive is fine and paying more than the least is an unnecessary price premium?]

It also notes that SMART will alert you LONG before the drive really dies - years even, at a couple TB / year? And that when it dies ... it's really dead. One last reboot and it's a brick. As Lori notes, the reallocated sector count seems to be the real tell.

So, 'apt-get install smartmontools' and forget about it until it tells you otherwise, and likely decades until you will?

[So I can be less worried if the drive has swap / holds vms? Warnings will be issued when appropriate, and even then ceasing use of the SSD for such will leave a long life for / and other normal use?]

>________________________________
> From: Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com>
>To: KWLUG discussion <kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> 
>Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 11:43 PM
>Subject: Re: [kwlug-disc] SMART for SSDs
> 
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>On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 11:24 PM, B.S. <bs27975 at yahoo.ca> wrote:
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>* IIRC, threads involving Khalid and his / this specific SSD and his unhappiness with this particular defective model noted a spectacularly bad product that entirely fails (even reading) far sooner than reasonable. IIUC the issues with this model was substantially a one off for SSDs, not expected to appear in others. Particularly nothing more recent? (It's just too bad Khalid happened to be one of the unlucky victims. There was great unhappiness in the land ...)
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>Some clarifications, and history:
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>The OCZ Vertex 4 SSD that I have did not fail (yet). Initially, I got it maybe 3 years ago to test MySQL performance on SSD. It did not show improvement perhaps because of other bottlenecks in the server (SATA controller?)
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>I was hesitant to make it my main laptop drive, because of the bad reputation for that model (whether it is true or not).
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>So, it was on a shelf for a long time. Then a year ago, I needed to revive a laptop with a decent/recent CPU, but broken hinge, to make it a transcoding machine (for the PVR videos). That SSD was lying around, so I used it.
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>The transcoding was not done to/from the SSD. The SSD was just for root, programs, logs. All the videos (original and transcoded) were done on external USB 3.0 drives.
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>Then my 7 year old laptop's Toshiba 500GB disk died without warning (can't remember if I checked SMART or not). So, I replaced it with a Seagate 500GB that I used for backup a couple of years back. 
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>When that Seagate's SMART data showed it is not in the best of health, I changed it with the SSD, since it has endured for a year without issues.
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>The transcoding machine got a used 2.5" Hitachi/Apple spinning disk to put in the transcoding machine. 
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>The other thing that encouraged me to move to the SSD I had was the endurance study, which as Lori said, is 200 TB of writes.
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>http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
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>I also have daily backups of my laptop's home directory, so losing a drive will just mean downtime, not data loss. 
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>All that made me switch to the SSD that I had on the shelf for so long.