[Nottingham] [Misc, OT, Humour] News Sensation! Linus Reads Discworld!

[Martin]

Folks,

Just a little fun giggle in the dull but sometimes surreal world of SSDs:

https://plus.google.com/113641248237520845183/posts/SXWeXVY7Y6p

"Linus Torvalds Mar 2, 2012

But both were Crucial m4's?

I seriously doubt that error has anything to do with the OS. That's a
failing drive. It's most likely dead.

You might be lucky and able to continue with it by just powering down
the machine, turning it around five times widdershins, and sacrificing a
small goat. Don't get any blood on the electronics, though. When you
power it back up, maybe things just magically work again for a while."

:-)


(Aside: And sure enough regarding the suspiciously timed SSDs fail:

"So yes, it turned out to be bad (extremely bad) firmware which made the
SSD stop responding after 5184 hours of power-on time. The Changelog
entry from http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx (choose M4 9mm
in the dropdown):

* Correct a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter
will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of
Power-on time. ..."

... So... More a 'problem' of the Linux kernel being *more reliable*
than the SSD firmware!

I'm not sure which may be the more 'unreal'... Terry Pratchett's
Discworld or the world of firmware...

Thank god for backups?! ;-)


Cheers,
Martin

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