[colug-432] failing hdd vs failing ssd

[Rick Hornsby]

In most cases over the years when I’ve had an HDD fail, there were early
signs - often noises that weren’t normal coming from the drive. The noise
usually doesn’t sound catastrophic, but rather the heads can be heard
moving around more than normal, or maybe the heads are seeking, briefly
parking, and then seeking (that’s a fairly obvious sound). The problems
might show up in the OS as an occasional I/O error, or a corrupted file,
but I can’t recall ever having any OS warn me specifically that a drive was
failing. Until, of course, the drive dies completely and becomes unusable
to the OS.

I have a HDD that’s currently failing. It’s been making more noise than
normal for the last few days. Last night I ran smartctl - mostly to figure
out which of the two HDDs might be a problem - and sure enough it found
some issues with one of the drives. Easy enough, just replace the drive and
move on. SMART doesn’t catch every drive I’ve had fail, but this time it
did.

But it got me thinking about SSDs. There are no mechanical parts, so
there’s nothing to hear. How do you know if an SSD is on the way out, other
than running smartctl all the time and looking at the results? Do desktop
OSs like Win/Mac/Linux have built-in facilities (I’m not aware of any?) for
notifying the user “hey, this drive is reporting problems. It’s likely a
sign of impending failure”? Would that even work on an SSD?

I know both kinds of drives can remap bad sectors, and that they are
designed with extra “space” to do just that. In my experience with failing
HDDs though, one bad sector tends to warn of, or worse cascade into, more
bad sectors rather quickly. I’m curious about ways we would know an SSD is
going to kick it?
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