[colug-432] failing hdd vs failing ssd

[Chris Punches]

Check out the attributes it reports when you do a smarctl test, like
Wear_Leveling_Count, etc

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-check-ssd-health-in-linux/

I guess you could add a shim like some distros do for fsck on init and
then pull the value, create an alert etc when certain values hit a
threshold.  Not much really changed in that space between IDE and SDD.

-C

On Wed, 2020-05-13 at 12:21 -0700, Rick Hornsby wrote:
> 
> 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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