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Comment by joenathan | Hacker News Reader

This article is light on details, and looking at the source it would be great to know brands and model numbers.

I use SSDs in all my builds, servers and workstations. My most used are Samsung 850 EVOs and PROs, follow by the Intel 750 and Samsung 950 PRO.

Out of bout 80 or so that I've put into production over the past few years I've had about 3 850 EVOs go bad on me, just completely lock up the machine they are connected to, can't even run diag. I make sure to use the PRO series in critical environments, and EVO for budget.

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The actual paper has much more information than the fluffy article that is linked here.

From the paper: "The drives in our study are custom designed high performance solid state drives, which are based on commodity flash chips, but use a custom PCIe interface, firmware and driver."

These aren't drives that you can just go out and buy, so brands and model numbers would be meaningless to anyone outside of Google.

Link to the paper: http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f...

> I've had about 3 850 EVOs go bad on me, just completely lock up the machine they are connected to, can't even run diag

That's worrying. It should at least stay a proper PCI-E citizen, not lock up the computer. And it should always provide the SMART data, even if the SSD is dead otherwise. And even if writing isn't possible anymore (safely, due to many bad bits), it should lock-down to read-only.

I think the EVO 850 are all SATA, not PCIe. But in general, yes, they should at least appear on the bus...

Interestingly, when this happenned to me, with some "ADATA" SSDs they would still negotiate a link speed, so their PHYs did get initialized. But Linux didn't get any further information from the disks, device type, name capacity... So maybe their firmware crashed halfway through initializing the SSD.

I was using OCZ Vertex 2 SSD in the past, when (possibly due to a firmware bug) it just wouldn't appear on the SATA bus anymore and had an error LED lit up. I RMA-d the drive, and they said they have to reflash the firmware, but doing so would also loose all data because it would erase the AES key. (I never configured any encryption on the drive, but apparently it does use it by default).

Needless to say I didn't buy OCZ again, but I'm not sure if this is a general problem with SSDs or just Sandforce controllers.

I think this was just an OCZ thing.

Where I work we have had more OCZ drives fail on us than not.

I wouldn't trust then even with temporary data, no matter what performance they can push.

How are the 950 Pro. Are they worth the hype? There is some rumors about them running too hot for laptop use actually.

I only have a few in production. I'm using a 512GB 950 on my gaming PC (has plenty of cooling, so can't comment on the heat, the Intel 750s have a heatsink though...) , it's replacing an 850, in practice it's hard to notice the difference between them. In a virtual environment when you have multiple VMs running on the same SSD, it has noticeable gains, higher IOPS and transfer speed make a big difference.

Most things I encounter in personal use are either CPU or GPU bound. There is nothing worse than having an application crawl to a halt when it is not even using a fraction of your system resources. Single threaded and 32 bit only applications are the bane of my existence.

its unlikely google is going to release brands and model numbers, they considered the information "proprietary" in their previous harddrive studies.

With their scale they might be ordering custom SSDs.

Edit: yep, right in the paper: "The drives in our study are custom designed high performance solid state drives, which are based on commodity flash chips, but use a custom PCIe interface, firmware and driver."

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