Luke Leighton

There was some widely circulated study few years ago which found that most SSD models they tested had problems on power loss. Some even bricked. They didn't publish concrete names, unfortunately. But yeah, I agree it's a bug and shouldn't happen. So what :) edit: There we go: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast13/fast13-final80.p… Some more: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html Note that the 320 recommended by the second article had similar issues, supposedly fixed in firmware 4PC10362, but some users reported problems even on that version: https://communities.intel.com/thread/24339?start=15 (many of those complaints look like different problems, but not all).

Indeed. See Luke Leighton's excellent "Analysis of SSD reliability during power outages" at http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html which came to the same conclusion some years ago.

Last weekend my ThinkPad running ZFS on Linux on a Samsung non-power-loss-protected consumer SSD lost various files when it ran out of power (including the entire Thunderbird profile because its SQLite DB was corrupted). I'm planning to replace it by the SSD linked above. I was already aware of the power loss issue on consumer SSDs (from the 2013 piece http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html), but I wanted to see it happen for real. I guess I did now.

I hoped it would discuss how SSDs cope with sudden power loss, but it doesn't seem to. I remember this page but I don't know of a modern update: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html These days, if I want an SSD for my desktop and want to minimise the chance I have a disk problem and have to restore from backup, would I be better off with one "data centre" drive (eg Intel D3-S4510), or two mirrored "consumer" drives (perhaps from two different manufacturers)? The prices look similar either way.

I wish reviews started taking reliability into account. The only report on power loss effects on actual hardware I could find is from 2014 [0]. http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html

It's not systemd that's the problem, it's libsystemd0. Try removing it on Stretch. It's doable [0] but it's a pain and makes future maintenance fragile and error prone. And if I understand correctly once you do so you're not running Gnome on that system anymore... [0] http://lkcl.net/reports/removing_systemd_from_debian/

A few years ago some of the intel SSD drives has issues with this. http://www.evanjones.ca/intel-ssd-durability.html Drive was advertising FUA but it didn't actually implement it (or implemented it incorrectly). Then there were drives that were storing things in cache and reporting as written but didn't actually have capacitors to write out the data in case of power failure. http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html , also the paper from FAST13. I think in 2016 the situation looks much better.

Additional Link: 15 Oct 2014: Letter to David Wilson and Howard Chu regarding Python-LMDB http://lkcl.net/reports/python.lmdb.html

According to this older article Intel SSD were the only ones that reliably stored data in a write-sync-powerloss scenario: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html But if they also completely brick themselves at EOL then it doesn't like a good choice, so ... are there any reliable SSDs??

SSDs have a slightly higher failure rate than mechanical drives, and when failed are mostly unrecoverable. Here is a report of massive failure rates (>50%) with OCZ drives: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html Right now the safest thing to do is to store at multiple cloud providers, where they have proper measures to manage disk failures.

The findings in this article match the findings of "Analysis of SSD Reliability during power outages" that we discussed 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973179 http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html

I'm not even convinced that these supremely ignorant "rights holders" really exist, except in scary tales handed down from one generation to the next. I mean, surely they don't think their "protection" is actually working, do they? Have they never been on the internet? RTMPE was cracked years ago (the handshaking consists of little more than sending an HMAC of a magic string and the player file)[1]. It's all just obfuscation. Putting a transparent layer over the video and obfuscating the file name will achieve the same effect, that is, preventing casual downloads. That's all they've got at the moment, even with Flash "DRM". 1. http://lkcl.net/rtmp/RTMPE.txt

RTMPE is a joke: http://lkcl.net/rtmp/RTMPE.txt "Overall, then, the Adobe RTMPE algorithm tries to provide end-to-end secrecy in exactly the same way that SSL provides end-to-end secrecy, but the algorithm is subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, provides no security, relies on publicly obtainable information and the algorithm itself to obfuscate the content, and uses no authentication of any kind" The Adobe response to this shoddy engineering being revealed? DMCA takedown requests to sourceforge: http://ossguy.com/?p=398

Open source developers are not entirely happy with this and mirrors of the rtmpdump app which got DMCA request are popping up: http://lkcl.net/rtmp/

There are several bits of documentation auto-generated from the docstrings - here's one: http://lkcl.net/pyjamas-desktop/docs/output/docui.html this is one i made by hacking the standard python 2.5 pydoc.py to auto-generated pyjamas code, which you then either run with pyjamas-desktop - http://pyjd.org - or you run through the pyjamas compiler - http://pyjs.org and you get the documentation. so it can and has been done. re the docs being linux-orientated: yep, i'm a linux baby :) and i haven't encountered too many windows people who use pyjamas, surprisingly. it's self-contained and OS-independent, so works perfectly.