On Mon, 2026-07-20 at 18:55 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote: > It simply depends on one's point of view. There certainly isn't an explicit, > actual counter that anyone can read, that announces how many cycles the > storage medium will remain operational for, before it loses its magic smoke. > > However, something logically equivalent to that does, in fact exist. It's > just nobody knows what the suicide clock reads, at any given moment. It's > like a quantum particle, you can never tell where it is. But it does exist, > this is a fact. SSDs are the only kind of a hardware that I know of that's > guaranteed to fail, by the virtue of its design and how it works. > > I also wouldn't be surprised if someday it'll leak that some manufacturer > quietly installed a real, explicit suicide clock in their SSDs. Given that > SSds are guaranteed to fail, at some point, nobody would suspect anything > odd if after three or five years of uptime the drive starts spewing errors > and refusing to power on.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised that testing has determined the predicted lifespan of the drive and a few key indicators, and that custom SMART monitoring could look for those datapoints that predict a looming death (not necessarily errors, but counters of certain events) then issues drive death predicted warnings. There's a very obvious thing to count: Drives have spare space that's reserved to be used up as areas fail. As that space dwindles, that would be an omen of impending doom. Thorough testing could combine factors, run time, temperature, power cycles, etc. And I wouldn't put it past drive manufacturers to deliberately engineer things to the point that it should last the warranty period with a bare margin (since other producers are known to do that). And then you're just expected to replace it. Other manufactured goods have predicted parts life that form part of routine maintenance cycles. e.g. You're expected to replace various parts of your cars within certain time periods, not just when they fail. *Nothing* is built to last any more. -- 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
