Fairwell HD, I knew thee well!

[GreyGeek]

So, do you have to reparation them to eliminate the Windows exe's and security junk so you can use Btrfs? What about "trim" to maintain speed. Available under Linux?

[oshunluvr]

Another interesting note: Samsung 850 PRO series drives have a 10 year warranty. Most HDs are 3-5 years. That says a lot.

[oshunluvr]

I checked out the Samsong Pro 256GB drive on Amazon. A couple thousand reviews with 3% of those giving it a one star. The firmware update accounted for a lot of the negative reviews, but there was too many who stated it just failed to boot without previous warnings. A lot of the failures which occurred before two years had passed. That's for a $155 drive. A cheaper one won't be better. IMO.

My research in the past shows that SSDs fail at a rate about equal to HDDs. The latest stuff I've read states the the total failure rate of SSDs is now less than HDDs but they're more likely to have bad sectors, and that the age of an SSD is more a wear factor than use. One vendor - Puget Systems - says Samsung SSDs are the most reliable component they've ever sold. Of course, vendors will inflate the facts to sell products too.

I'm sure most of us realize that most people don't take the time to post comments or reviews if we're satisfied with a product, only if we have trouble. Therefore in my view, bad reviews from retail customers are taken with very large salt grains - and an exponential reduction in weight. IMO, the 87% 5-star on Amazon is much more significant than the 3% 1-star. Interesting comparison: The Western Digital (my preferred HD brand) 750GB "Black" (performance) model 2.5" drive has a review ratio (5-stars to 1-stars) of 82:4 (780 reviews) and the model closest to your current HD, the 320GB "Blue" drive is even worse at 76:5 (1300+ reviews). Therefore, one can logically conclude that if Amazon reviews are a primary decision factor; the SSD is the correct choice. When you factor in the "free" benefits: power savings (better battery life), reduction in heat (better overall component life), and reduction in accidental damage from dropping, the SSD stands out as the best choice.

My anecdotal experience with SSDs vs HDDs: I bought my first SSD (cheapest I could get) about 8 years ago to play around with it. It died in a couple months and was replaced under warranty. The replacement lasted several years of light use. During that time, I had 4 HDD failures at almost exactly 3 years - just past their warranty expiration. These were heavily used and the first one gave off warnings so I pulled the others (they were a set of 4 used for RAID) all off-line and re-purposed them as backup drives. They all died within 4 months of each other (that's what you call quality control - nearly simultaneous death just past warranty dates ).

Since then, I have purchased Adata (2), Samsung (3), and Kingston(1) SSDs and WD(4) HDDs, none of which have failed or had bad sectors. If it means anything, my sister works for a media distribution company that has servers all over the world. They use Samsung SSDs by the tens of thousands and no platter drives.

The point to all this: There's a lot of FUD about SSDs most of which is debunkable. Computers in general are a fast moving target and SSDs are developing at a higher rate than that. The only reason to buy a platter drive is the GB-to-$ ratio. All other factors have diminished in deviation as to be inconsequential.

EDIT: My oldest Samsung SSD is a 840 Pro model: Power_On_Hours = 24262, Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt = 0, Total_LBAs_Written = 21346150209

[wizard10000]

Latest results.

Who makes the most reliable hard drive? Latest BackBlaze survey claims to know

I would agree with the survey. If it's got to have a spindle I prefer Hitachi drives. Samsung used to be my #2 choice and I've never had either a Samsung or Hitachi drive fail, but Samsung doesn't make hard drives any more

[Snowhog]

Latest results.

Who makes the most reliable hard drive? Latest BackBlaze survey claims to know

[GreyGeek]

I checked out the Samsong Pro 256GB drive on Amazon. A couple thousand reviews with 3% of those giving it a one star. The firmware update accounted for a lot of the negative reviews, but there was too many who stated it just failed to boot without previous warnings. A lot of the failures which occurred before two years had passed. That's for a $155 drive. A cheaper one won't be better. IMO.

[oshunluvr]

Happy birthday Jerry!

In my experience, spontaneous reboot is more often caused by a failing power supply or overheated CPU than the hdd. While you have the laptop opened up, give the CPU heat sink and fan a cleaning and that may help as much as a new hdd.

Agreed.

And as others have stated: "pre-fail" and "old age" are the normal responses. However, I have several drives with more than 60,000 Power_on_hours with no reallocated sectors so I'm not sure I would state the drive is old. The bad sectors are troublesome but only if they're increasing. If you're seeing an uptick in reallocation, I'd replace it fast.

Might I suggest a small SSD instead of an HD? Less power, less heat, less likely to damage it from a drop, and I suspect you don't really need a full 640GB for a linux machine. Besides, you can always keep the SSD when the laptop finally dies and move it to another computer. I prefer Samsung PRO drives but if you want to spend dollars more locally, try a Mushkin drive. They're based in Englewood,CO so at least some of your money stays here.

[Goeroeboeroe]

Happy birthday.
I missed this thread. My main computer is also about five years old and very cheap. Every month I check the harddisk, and as long as I can remember I get that pre-fail and old age. But the disk is running fine. Just like me, also pre-fail and old-age but still running )
A few years ago I had a search for pre-fail and old-age. I don't remember the details exactly, but it has something to do with the expected lifetime as set by the manufacturer. Since then I don't worry about it anymore. I just make regularly back-ups, so if the disk dies, I still have everything.

[MoonRise]

so I didn't lose the 17 diamonds I found

Yeah, my youngest and I were doing good and had found and took several of those but to get trapped in an area with an overactive zombie spawner. Couldn't fight off enough and lost them all!! I know how that would feel to loose those!

[GreyGeek]

Happy Birthday, GG, and many more too!

In my experience, spontaneous reboot is more often caused by a failing power supply or overheated CPU than the hdd. But your hdd is getting a little long in the tooth, for sure. While you have the laptop opened up, give the CPU heat sink and fan a cleaning and that may help as much as a new hdd.

Thanks for the HB wishes folks! When I was a lot younger I never thought I'd get to this age, considering my "close encounters" of the past. (stupid driving techniques and stunts, events while a LEO, cockpit fire when flying Cessna 172, hydraulic failures on a Boeing 727 leading to a high speed emergency landing -- did you know it has no hydraulic redundancy?, and many more ...)

An overheated GPU can blank the screen or trigger a reboot as well. That and all the things you folks have mentioned I have experienced at one time or another. I keep cans of air by my computer and regularly blow it out. I also have it setting on a cooling fan and I have a CPU temp widget in the panel. My CPU has a max T of 95C. The highest the temp monitor has shown, that I happened to notice for it, was 74C.

My laptop was purchased in 2010. About a year ago I had a sudden reboot episode (don't remember what I was doing) and that prompted me to install the CPU temp monitor because I suspected that it was caused by the CPU getting too hot and never looked for any other cause. As I write this my CPU temp is idling around 39C. My smartctl long test yesterday didn't add anything new. Just to be safe I ordered a replacement drive to have on hand encase of failure. And, I am going to use btrfs to send a copy of my @ and @home to another HD.

Oh, Minecraft 1.10.2 recovered without a loss of anything. It must have happened right after an automatic save (which may have caused it?), so I didn't lose the 17 diamonds I found while mining at level 5.

[MoonRise]

Happy B-Day GG!!

[Qqmike]

dibl: In my experience, spontaneous reboot is more often caused by a failing power supply or overheated CPU than the hdd. But your hdd is getting a little long in the tooth, for sure. While you have the laptop opened up, give the CPU heat sink and fan a cleaning and that may help as much as a new hdd.

Yep, that's my experience, too.

Happy B-Day GG! Wishing you many more, to boot! (pun, there, ya know ...)

[wizard10000]

Belated happy birthday, GG

[dibl]

Happy Birthday, GG, and many more too!

In my experience, spontaneous reboot is more often caused by a failing power supply or overheated CPU than the hdd. But your hdd is getting a little long in the tooth, for sure. While you have the laptop opened up, give the CPU heat sink and fan a cleaning and that may help as much as a new hdd.

[kubicle]

Happy Birthday GG

which showed that eight of the 25 tests were "pre-failure" and the rest were old age.

Those just tell the test type, not the actual result. Brand new and fully functional drives will show exactly the same test types, these just indicate whether "bad" results suggest "an impending failure" or just "old age which increases chances of failure".

The important columns when interpreting the results are VALUE (current value), WORST (worst value), THRESH ("bad result" threshold)...and the RAW_VALUE (depending on the test).

Looking at your results, the only pre-fail result with a non-zero RAW_VALUE count is "Reallocated_Sector_Ct" and that number is not necessarily alarming by itself (bad sectors are not that uncommon) unless it starts increasing abnormally. "Spin_Up_Time" also has a non-zero RAW_VALUE, but that just shows the spin up time in milliseconds (not really a "count").

Not saying the drive isn't failing, increasing bad sector errors are usually bad news, just that you shouldn't throw a disk away just because you see "old age" or "pre-fail" on the test type column.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.....T._attributes)