FC11 - Health problems for my SSD drive?

[fred smith]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 11:09:06PM +0000, Stewart Williams wrote:
> Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> > Again FC11 newly installed on an ASUS ee 701 that has a 4Gb SSD drive. 
> > Since that is NOT enough space, I have a 8Gb SD card in the slot and the
> > / and /boot partitions is on the SD card.  Swap drive and /home are on
> > the SSD card.
> > 
> > Anyway, I just got a drive health warning.  Opening the Icon I get it
> > telling me about potential problems with the SSD drive.  It 'passed' the
> > assessment, but in the details some attributes exceeded the thresholds.
> > 
> > 
> > Now before I dive into this, I am wondering if SMART can tell this is an
> > SSD drive and some things WILL be different???
> > 
> > 
> 
> I recently had F10 and Mandriva 2009.1 installed and running fine on my
> eee 900 using the removable 16GB SSD as my /home and swap partitions.
> 
> I decided to upgrade to F11 and anaconda produced errors during writing
> the partition layout and/or formatting them. I tried many times and it
> just kept aborting the install with different errors.
> 
> I suspected a problem with one of the drives, so with the Live USB
> install loaded, I ran `dmesg` in a terminal and discovered lots of
> kernel errors writing to /dev/sdb (the 16GB SSD).
> 
> ...
> 
> Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 1
> 
> ...
> 
> I tried writing files, fdisking, etc. the drive and it just produced
> more of the above I/O errors, and it seemed extremely so when working on
> the drive.
> 
> I was convinced the drive was faulty and was ready to send it to asus
> for a warranty repair.
> 
> Before doing this, I restore the factory Xandros image and also thought
> I'd zero the drive out to clear any of my data off first.
> 
> I ran:
> 
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1K
> 
> After a while it completed without error. (I didn't take note of how
> long it took)
> 
> I ran `dmesg` again to see if there were masses of errors, but there
> were none.
> 
> I rebooted and thought I'd try partitioning it again as there were no
> errors and to my absolute amazement. I managed to partition, create a
> filesystem, mount and write data to the drive with no I/O errors and it
> was fast again. Using it for over a week it's still running 100% and F11
> even installed first time.
> 
> Weird or what?
> 
> I know with normal hard disks I/O errors indicate a dying drive, but not
>  having much experience with SSD drives, are they that different. Is it
> possible the drive is OK now??? it certainly seems it.
> 
> BTW. smartctl doesn't seem to be aware of the drive in it's database. So
> that didn't help much.

I had similar problems on my 901 with the 16 gig SSD. but nothing I
could do would resurrect it from i/o-error-land, so I got it into asus
for repair with 2-3 weeks of warranty left.

I dunno if it was just bad chips in the ssd, or if we actually wrote
to some of the cells so many times that they suffered from the kinds
of failures flash ram is reputed to suffer when written too many times.
I guess I'll find out over the next 6-12 months, if the replacement ssd
also goes wonky on me.
-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
               But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: 
                         While we were still sinners, 
                              Christ died for us.
------------------------------- Romans 5:8 (niv) ------------------------------