How SSD's work

[GreyGeek]

[nicrnicr]

Thank you :-)

[MoonRise]

Wow!!!! Now that is some detail. Interesting.

Thanks!!

[bloggerseye]

SSDs use flash memory to store data, which is accessed digitally.

[suplero]

I like my ssds, but I am very wary of their lifespan and failure mechanism - as in the entire drive becomes done in when the drive fails to be recognized. Isn't the drive controller the single point of failure for all data?

I have not experienced a failure so far, but it is always on my mind when working with them. Even though my hdd are much slower, I trust them just a bit more, because of the possibility of seeing failing sectors before everything is lost.

[zaphod]

One way to avoid the heck that comes with a dead SSD, IMHO, is to lower writes to it. One way I have mitigated a lot of writing, is (in desktops) to make sure I put a spinner in with the SSD, and use the spinner for swap partition, and file storage. Bar using a spinner, as in a laptop with no room for more than one drive, one can use a much cheaper SD card, or thumb drive for their swap drive, and/or set vm.swappiness to 1, or even 0 if you have a gob of RAM.

Edit: I forgot to say, when choosing a spinner for swap file, do not go for anything larger that 2TB, elsewise you will probably take a huge performance hit. It's another HDD rabbit hole to go down, but 3 TB is the transition zone between CMR, and SMR... and SMR is SLOW!

[GreyGeek]

Since I began using a "personal computer" in the summer of 1978, every storage medium I've ever used came with failure modes that I encountered sooner or later. The worst was the 1/4" tape backup drive, which constantly jammed and also rubbed the black Iron Oxide off the tape, rendering it useless for recording. It was slow. Backing up 5Mb required at least 30 minutes. The second worse was the Zip Drive, which used a cassette to store 100Mb of data. Remember the "Click of Death"? Almost as bad was the 5Mb Corna HD disk which was the size of a small suitcase and took 15 minutes to warm up before you could reliably use it. The HD's I've used over the years, beginning with the 10Mb HD in the IBM PC Xt I bought around 1983, IIRC, didn't last too long and was upgraded to a 20Mb, then a 40Mb, then an 80Mb, and I lost track of them after that. The first 1Gb drive I used, the Baracuda, died within a year.

Then came CD and DVD ROM's. Supposed to last for 20, 30, 50 or 100 years, 1/3rd of mine lost access to their data within 5 years. I haven't checked on them since around 2010, so the dye layer has probably oxidized away.

After that came USB sticks. Still a popular item today, especially with we Linux users. I've had some die within days of taking them out of the boxes they arrived it. It used to be that if it was made it China you couldn't county on either its capacity or its life span. Now, everything is made in China. I bought 3 from Amazon that were claimed to be 16Gb. Plugged them in and gparted listed the partition as 16Gb. Run a capacity test and any data written after 2Gb was lost, because they were 2Gb sticks putzed to look like 16Gb The first clue I had that they could be fake was their price, but I decided to try them anyway because they were so cheap.

All in all, though, the USB stick has been, for me, the most reliable storage medium when I stick with name brands. Ditto with SSD and NVMe drives, EXCEPT when the vendor, I'm looking at you Newegg, sells mislabeled junk.

Here's my main drive SSD:

Physical Disk Information - Disk: #1: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB

Hard Disk Summary

	Hard Disk Number	:	1
	Hard Disk Device	:	/dev/sda
	Interface	:	S-ATA Gen3, 6 Gbps
	Hard Disk Model ID	:	Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB
	Firmware Revision	:	RVT03B6Q
	Hard Disk Serial Number	:	S3Z1NY0M803506Z
	SSD Controller	:	Samsung
	Total Size	:	476940 MB
	Current Temperature	:	34 °C (93 °F)
	Maximum Temperature (during Entire Lifespan)	:	49 °C (120 °F)
	Power On Time	:	445 days, 3 hours
	Estimated Remaining Lifetime	:	more than 1000 days
	Lifetime Writes	:	5.34 TB

	Health	:		♦	100 % (Excellent)
	Performance	:		♦	100 % (Excellent)