Question And it's happening: storage options will be limited without Samsung SATA SSD

[Golgatha]

I didn't think SATA SSD's, at least the 2.5" ones, were worth much if they are < 1000GB... I've got a stack of them I don't know what to do with. They're all ~250 or 500GB though.

I don't like getting rid of them either, since they are useful for OS drives in a pinch.

I've been buying enterprise class used 500GB drives for modding Playstation 2 consoles. Just about the perfect size unless you need more than like 250 games on there.

 

[mikeymikec]

No, I mean Read Fatigue. Steven Hetzler published a paper on SSD Reliability when he worked at IBM.
It has been well documented through testing that repeatedly reading the same block can and will degrade it, AND potentially also degrade the adjacent memory sections as well.
(It was found because it happens even on read only areas of the SSD which are never written to)

There are many utilities and firmware updates which schedule frequently read areas to be re-written over time to help mitigate this effect.

What they're describing sounds to me like it only applies to very limited circumstances because every single Windows PC at least would be vulnerable to this issue and I'm not seeing tonnes of PCs with inexplicable filesystem-related issues magically solved with wipes or some similarly odd fix. Also, come to think of it, I've seen a grand total of one decent SSD with a noticeable throughput issue, and that was one I had in a USB enclosure which was easily solved by running TRIM on the drive (I use the drive for quick backups of customers' PCs, so it doesn't stay connected via USB for long and experiences lots of writes).

They don't even seem to have a workable theory as to why their situation is happening (in a real world sense), because surely tonnes of PCs are being switched on and shut down every day and for example sector zero isn't being "soft worn out".

I'm not saying the guy is completely wrong, there's probably something worthy of note from his experiences, but the precise problem(s) he's seen need to be fleshed out more thoroughly, after all, how many millions of computers are out there right now being used in a daily fashion, and we'd be seeing vast majority percentages of them experiencing inexplicably boot problems and/or massive SSD slowdowns, if the problem is as inherent to modern SSD designs as he claims.