On Sun, 2026-07-19 at 22:00 -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote: > How literal is that? > Do SSDs really have an I'm-dead bit that once flipped, > by time or some other event, causes them to quit even trying? > > I'm aware of flash wear and wear-leveling.
I think it's more of a public insult that people apply to SSDs, than that they're actually time-bombed in some fashion. They are infamous for sudden and unexpected death, though. But I wouldn't be too surprised if there is some flag that gets set to forced read-only mode if the drive's self test gets very upset. Hard drives tend to go wonky with some small but noticeable problems giving you time to ensure you're backed up and have a replacement to install before it's too late. Though, having said that, I had a hard drive in a security system suddenly die, and die very hard. I think I may have had a minor error warning about a week beforehand, the kind that make you think it just wasn't happy about being rudely interrupted by something. But the drive become a complete brick. The electronics don't even respond to any polling if you plug it into anything. Fortunately for me, there was no need to recover anything from that drive, a fresh replacement was all I had to do. That's the first hard drive I've ever had do that. Usually HDDs just have an unfixable unrecoverable error warning for some spot on the surface. And sometimes it spreads. My policy, here, is HDDs for data that you consider important (homespace, databases, etc), and SSDs for system and scratch space (it's faster, and totally replaceable without any angst). Two drive systems are good for upgrading, too. You can unplug your data drive and safely upgrade (and experiment), then reconnect once you're happy with a new install. On the other hand, for people who're security obsessed and must destroy a drive before disposal, SSDs are far easier to physically trash with a hammer than a HDD. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new
