Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheLoneWolfling | Hacker News Reader

And what about the drive that went into read-only mode, and then on reboot bricked itself? By design?

I can easily see someone having their computer lock up / etc, restarting, and losing their data. As restarting is often one of the first debugging steps for so many things.

View on HN

You know, the drives have their own CPU and RAM, and execute their own software. The software keeps the copy of some table needed to do the proper reads in RAM and tries to update it to the flash as the response of the normal data write. The flash fails and the software gets the notification about that. The software can provide the reads from the info in RAM as long as the info remains in RAM so it enters the read-only mode. After the reboot there are only the bad bits on the flash, the RAM content is fully wiped away by the reboot.

The person you are replying to is talking about a "defective by design" problem they want solved. You are explaining how this defect works.

So have a small area of flash that's only used to dump the RAM to at EOL. I, for one, would much rather have a little bit less space available, with a better chance of not bricking at EOL, than the current situation.

Looks like a good idea to me, the question is how small the area would be. I think I've read somewhere that writing that data takes some 40 seconds on some Samsung given the write speeds around 400 MB/s which is approx 16 GB reserved for the feature of user being able to read the failed drive which notified the user long before that the declared number of counts was already spent. Somebody who actually has better (industry insider) info is welcome to correct me.

Out of curiosity, I looked up SSD data recovery, and here is what one of the first Google hits had to say about it, in a prominent location.

"If your SSD has stopped working and you cannot access the data, the best thing to do is to turn it off to prevent further damage." [1]

Maybe that advice needs to be reconsidered?

[1] http://www.payam.com.au/content_common/pg-ssd-data-recovery....

As restarting is often one of the first debugging steps for so many things.

If you're the kind of person who can troubleshoot a faulty drive, then you're not the kind of person who should reboot as a first step towards debugging. Especially if you suspect a faulty drive.

I suspect that most people, when a computer freezes, don't instantaneously suspect a faulty drive. At least not before they try other things, a large chunk of which require reboots.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com