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Death and Resurrection of an SSD (rentzsch.tumblr.com)
11 points by basil on Nov 18, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



Ugh. Rentzsch is a braver person than I.

I wonder how many days of backups he keeps. If his drive were to start silently corrupting data again, how long would it take him to figure it out? Even if he did have an extensive archive, hunting through it to find good versions of all of his files would be a royal pain.

I'm also curious how stressdrive handles the various levels of caching between it and the disk. I guess the expectation is that the cache is not nearly as large as the entire drive?


Btw, a quick way to write random data to your disk is with "dd":

    dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/your_disk_dev bs=1m
Use "bs=1M" on linux. It read back the data like his stresstest program does, but it's really about as "close to the kernel" as you can get without writing your own C code (and you probably aren't going to do anything faster or better than dd already does).


EDIT: I see now that you say "It read back the data like his stresstest program does" and probably mean "It won't read back data..."

While your command is a good way to quickly write random data to a drive, note that it doesn't match the functionality of his stressdrive program, which keeps a checksum of the random data it wrote, and then reads back the data from the drive to verify the checksum.

Not that that would be hard to do with a few pipes. Note that the docs for stressdrive[1] mention this:

    "Pshaw! I could do this with dd, /dev/random & shasum!"
     Indeed you could. I prefer a minimal focused tool whose
     operation is fixed, its source simple+readable and
     offers good built-in progress reporting.
[1]: https://github.com/rentzsch/stressdrive


How is this different from writing each block's own address to it, and reading them back? That's the test I use to detect errors in block addressing.


Whoops. Yes, I did indeed mean "It won't read back data...".




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