Re: SSD TBW

In comp.misc Don Y <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 8/21/2026 12:32 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>   =?UTF-8?B?IEdsb3N0w6lpcg==?=  <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I do not yet have a first-hand experience of an SSD failure. Don Y
>>> complains in news:sci.electronics.design that an SSD suddenly
>>> completely failed, instead of gradual partial degradations of a hard
>>> disk. What does Lawrence D'Oliveiro mean by
>>> "before
>>> showing signs of failure."?
>> 
>> With a conventional hard drive, first you might see some error numbers
>> creeping up on your SMART tool, as individual blocks start failing.  There
>> is a bad block replacement process that is transparent to the OS so all you
>> see are bad numbers on SMART.  Then you start getting media errors and
>> then it's all over.
> 
> The firmware in spinning rust controllers has matured over decades.
> This is not the case with SSDs (especially early entrants to the market).
> 
> Note that the media fails in different ways and the controller has
> to understand these and adequately address them, in the wild.

The non-standard SSD card in my EeePC 701 was repeatedly getting
corrupted data, a common problem with these I believe. So I
repartitioned it using just the upper half of the drive instead of
all the space for the system partition, and no more corruption.
Obviously the wear leveling done by that SSD controller isn't very
sophisticated and had worn out the flash used for the starting
sectors of the drive. I thought modern SSDs for use in PCs must
have improved from that to some extent. But it's a case of gradual
failure more like a HDD (though I've certainly seen sudden death
with HDDs too).

> Many "Thumb drives" have had problematic firmware (some Phison and
> Hynix controllers).  The fix requires a firmware upgrade -- WHILE
> the drive is still willing to talk to its host.

I didn't realise firmware upgrades were available for USB drives.
Is there any way to apply them from Linux?

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