Re: [GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures
| From: Howard Gibson via talk |When I bought a hard drive at Best Buy, I asked about SSDs. Seeking advice from Best Buy isn't a great idea. Q: What's the difference between a used car salesperson and a computer salesperson? A: The used car salesperson knows that he's lying. | I | understand that there is a maximum number of writes you can do to them, | and the number is rather small. I was buying a backup drive that runs | at night while I am in bed, so I went for cheap and reliable. Don't buy a backup drive, buy several. At least alternate them. Otherwise all your backups may disappear in the same nasty event. If you wear out a backup device (SSD or HDD), you are doing it wrong. (SSDs actually have decent "endurance" specs for normal uses. Do the arithmetic, if you care.) I imagine that an HDD (or several) would be better for backups than an SSD: - HDDs are quite a bit cheaper per byte than SSDs - HDDs are fast enough for backups. - backups usually need decent sequential write performance, something that HDDs are fine with. Relative to HDDs, SSDs excel at random access, something that rarely matters with backups. - many recent-generation inexpensive SSDs slow to a crawl once their write buffer is full. This would likely happen with a backup. - there's a finite lifetime for information written to an HDD; my guess: 5 years is safe. You don't want to find this out experimentally. SSD information might well be significantly shorter-lived: I've heard claims of this but don't know the reality. I don't wish to find out :-) All archives need to be recopied regularly. Media change (I have some information stranded in 9-track tapes). It seems as if the newer the medium, the shorter the lifespan. - petroglyphs: long long time - clay tablets: millennia - paper (pre-wood-pulp): five hundred years - paper made from wood pulp: 75 years - punch cards and paper tape: 100 years - 9-track mag tape: 10 years - digital cassette tape 4 years (formats changed too quickly) - floppy disks: 5 years? Depends on the format (consider 3.0" floppies) - USB flash drives: I've had them die after a year, but that's not expected. - hard drives: death by standards evolution. Try finding an ST506 controller. Or MFM, ESDI, SCSI, FireWire. Support for even PATA is fading. - Laser Disc, Magneto-optical disks, CD-ROM, DVD (multiple standards), BluRay: each has standards that get obsolete. The actual data may deteriorate too. I do have some DVD that claim to have a lifetime of over 100 years. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures
| From: William Park via talk | Lesson here: Don't buy Asus laptop, if you want reliability. Can you expand on that? --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures
On Thu, Aug 01, 2019 at 11:15:43AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote: > We bought two Asus ux305ca notebooks about three years ago. The Microsoft > Store had a remarkably good deal on them. I'm not the only GTALUGger to > buy this notebook. Lesson here: Don't buy Asus laptop, if you want reliability. -- William Park --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures
On Thu, 1 Aug 2019 11:15:43 -0400 (EDT)
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" wrote:
>
> Two years ago one of the m.2 SATA SSDs suddenly stopped working. If I
> remember correctly, it didn't even show up as a disk.
>
> Last week the same thing happened on the second notebook.
>
> The only warning was that a few days earlier the firmware forgot what
> to boot. I easily fixed that by telling it again. This could easily
> have been a CMOS battery problem but I guess it wasn't.
>
> The computer acted as if the drive were not there. I installed it in a
> different machine and it was not detected in the other machine either.
> The firmware ("BIOS" is not the correct term) on both machines failed
> to see it. A live Fedora system (booted off a USB stick) failed to
> see it. It's dead, Jim.
>
> Lesson: SSDs don't give you warning about failures. Much worse (in my
> modest experience) than HDDs. Backup now. I'm skeptical about
> S.M.A.R.T. for SSDs.
Hugh,
When I bought a hard drive at Best Buy, I asked about SSDs. I understand
that there is a maximum number of writes you can do to them, and the number is
rather small. I was buying a backup drive that runs at night while I am in
bed, so I went for cheap and reliable.
--
Howard Gibson
hgib...@eol.ca
jhowardgib...@gmail.com
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures
On Thu, 1 Aug 2019 at 11:15, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote: > Two years ago one of the m.2 SATA SSDs suddenly stopped working. If I > remember correctly, it didn't even show up as a disk. > > Last week the same thing happened on the second notebook. Yikes! I guess I better see if I have anything on mine I need to backup! So far the only issue I've had with mine in the power button after I spilled a drink on it. I had to replace the keyboard and now I have a rubber cover over the keyboard (very cheap on AliExpress). --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
[GTALUG] War Story: Asus UX305ca SSD failures
We bought two Asus ux305ca notebooks about three years ago. The Microsoft
Store had a remarkably good deal on them. I'm not the only GTALUGger to
buy this notebook.
Two years ago one of the m.2 SATA SSDs suddenly stopped working. If I
remember correctly, it didn't even show up as a disk.
Last week the same thing happened on the second notebook.
The only warning was that a few days earlier the firmware forgot what
to boot. I easily fixed that by telling it again. This could easily
have been a CMOS battery problem but I guess it wasn't.
The computer acted as if the drive were not there. I installed it in a
different machine and it was not detected in the other machine either.
The firmware ("BIOS" is not the correct term) on both machines failed
to see it. A live Fedora system (booted off a USB stick) failed to
see it. It's dead, Jim.
Lesson: SSDs don't give you warning about failures. Much worse (in my
modest experience) than HDDs. Backup now. I'm skeptical about
S.M.A.R.T. for SSDs.
Inference: there may have been something wrong with the model of SSD
used by Asus in the ux305ca. Two out of two failed us. Micron M600
256GB. I've had other SSDs fail, but only in the early days of SSDs.
It's fairly easy to replace such a drive. You need to remove about a
dozen screws and pry open the case. For the ux305ca you need a TORX
T5 driver. For prying: use an old credit card, guitar pick, or
spudger (don't use a screw driver since it may scratch or scar the
case).
Lesson: search YouTube for videos on taking apart you notebook. They
are not perfect but they give you an idea of what you are in for.
I'm actually doing musical chairs with SSDs. I have a spare NVMe SSD
but the Asus can only take an m.2 SATA drive. I have a Dell notebook
with an m.2 SATA drive but it can also support an NVMe drive.
- broken m.2 SATA drive from Asus => ???
- m.2 SATA SSD from DELL notebook => Asus
- new unused NVMe SSD => DELL notebook
Background on SSD interfaces:
First there were mSATA SSDs. Those were supported on some older
machines (eg. ThinkPad T20 and T30 notebooks).
Then came NGFF ("New Generation Form Factor") connectors and
interfaces about the time of Haswell processors from Intel. They were
quickly renamed to m.2 (because it rolls of the tongue, doesn't it?).
Originally m.2 drives used the same SATA interface. Recently, the
NVMe interface was added. It's just like PCIe on a different
connector. That interface is much faster than SATA. It's so good
that most new desktop motherboards support it -- it's not just for
notebooks.
I'm not sure when one would notice the speed difference between SATA
and NVMe. SATA SSDs are already almost always a lot faster than HDDs.
The first generation of NVMe SSDs had internal bottlenecks that may
have limited the improvement over SATA.
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