Of a small Atom based fanless computer with a solid state disk that was
designed to be bombproof, getting a bad sector



and that sector being the inode containing the directory data for /sbin/

?!!



It was a bit worrying[1] when on reboot it said "/sbin/init not found" (to
non linux people, that's basically the program that boots everything else
after the kernel has initialised. Having that directory missing is generally
a Bad Thing (TM)


[1] As this is my router/firewall/DHCP server, I went ape****.


Luckily, I had a backup copy of / on another partition (and now on my
laptop) and managed to put /sbin back booting off a recovery USB stick.



--
Tim Watts Personal Blog: http://www.dionic.net/tim/

If you are reading this from a web interface eg DIY Banter,
DIY Forum or Google Groups, please be aware this is NOT a forum, and
you are merely using a web portal to a USENET group. Many people block
posters coming from web portals due to perceived SPAM or inaneness.
For a better method of access, please see:

http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?title=Usenet

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:47:57 +0000, Tim Watts wrote:

Of a small Atom based fanless computer with a solid state disk that was
designed to be bombproof, getting a bad sector



and that sector being the inode containing the directory data for /sbin/

?!!



It was a bit worrying[1] when on reboot it said "/sbin/init not found"
(to non linux people, that's basically the program that boots everything
else after the kernel has initialised. Having that directory missing is
generally a Bad Thing (TM)


[1] As this is my router/firewall/DHCP server, I went ape****.


Luckily, I had a backup copy of / on another partition (and now on my
laptop) and managed to put /sbin back booting off a recovery USB stick.

I run mine off a CF card. And I have spares!

--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
My posts (including this one) are my copyright and if @diy_forums on
Twitter wish to tweet them they can pay me £30 a post
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Tuesday 08 January 2013 00:15 Bob Eager wrote in uk.d-i-y:

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:47:57 +0000, Tim Watts wrote:

Of a small Atom based fanless computer with a solid state disk that was
designed to be bombproof, getting a bad sector



and that sector being the inode containing the directory data for /sbin/

?!!



It was a bit worrying[1] when on reboot it said "/sbin/init not found"
(to non linux people, that's basically the program that boots everything
else after the kernel has initialised. Having that directory missing is
generally a Bad Thing (TM)


[1] As this is my router/firewall/DHCP server, I went ape****.


Luckily, I had a backup copy of / on another partition (and now on my
laptop) and managed to put /sbin back booting off a recovery USB stick.

I run mine off a CF card. And I have spares!


That's (almost) what I thought I was doing with an SSD - maybe they are more
failure prone?...

I am running it close to the bone without fans - it's not a weedy processor,
but it's in a case that is grid punched with holes over most of the top and
sides. Knowing it *can* run without a fan, perhaps I should put a slow quiet
one in just to drop the temps.

smartctl reported (for a long self test) "no errors" this morning...

--
Tim Watts Personal Blog: http://www.dionic.net/tim/

If you are reading this from a web interface eg DIY Banter,
DIY Forum or Google Groups, please be aware this is NOT a forum, and
you are merely using a web portal to a USENET group. Many people block
posters coming from web portals due to perceived SPAM or inaneness.
For a better method of access, please see:

http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?title=Usenet

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

On 08/01/13 07:56, Tim Watts wrote:
On Tuesday 08 January 2013 00:15 Bob Eager wrote in uk.d-i-y:

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:47:57 +0000, Tim Watts wrote:

Of a small Atom based fanless computer with a solid state disk that was
designed to be bombproof, getting a bad sector



and that sector being the inode containing the directory data for /sbin/

?!!



It was a bit worrying[1] when on reboot it said "/sbin/init not found"
(to non linux people, that's basically the program that boots everything
else after the kernel has initialised. Having that directory missing is
generally a Bad Thing (TM)


[1] As this is my router/firewall/DHCP server, I went ape****.


Luckily, I had a backup copy of / on another partition (and now on my
laptop) and managed to put /sbin back booting off a recovery USB stick.

I run mine off a CF card. And I have spares!


That's (almost) what I thought I was doing with an SSD - maybe they are more
failure prone?...

I am running it close to the bone without fans - it's not a weedy processor,
but it's in a case that is grid punched with holes over most of the top and
sides. Knowing it *can* run without a fan, perhaps I should put a slow quiet
one in just to drop the temps.

There are onchip sensors to report chip temps on the CPU and generally
motherboard as well.

Mine runs in a case with PSU with fan but that's all - no issues.

I suspect that the flash chip is more the issue than the CPU.

Judging by my general reading on the subject, all flash chips are not
created equal., and death can happen when changing data - block erases
are followed by individual writes to change even one sector.

I think flash will get better, but for now I wouldn't use it except as
a temporary store of non critical data or in a read only manner.


smartctl reported (for a long self test) "no errors" this morning...



--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.

On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 07:56:11 +0000, Tim Watts wrote:

On Tuesday 08 January 2013 00:15 Bob Eager wrote in uk.d-i-y:

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:47:57 +0000, Tim Watts wrote:

Of a small Atom based fanless computer with a solid state disk that
was designed to be bombproof, getting a bad sector



and that sector being the inode containing the directory data for
/sbin/

?!!



It was a bit worrying[1] when on reboot it said "/sbin/init not found"
(to non linux people, that's basically the program that boots
everything else after the kernel has initialised. Having that
directory missing is generally a Bad Thing (TM)


[1] As this is my router/firewall/DHCP server, I went ape****.


Luckily, I had a backup copy of / on another partition (and now on my
laptop) and managed to put /sbin back booting off a recovery USB
stick.

I run mine off a CF card. And I have spares!


That's (almost) what I thought I was doing with an SSD - maybe they are
more failure prone?...

I am running it close to the bone without fans - it's not a weedy
processor,
but it's in a case that is grid punched with holes over most of the top
and sides. Knowing it *can* run without a fan, perhaps I should put a
slow quiet one in just to drop the temps.

smartctl reported (for a long self test) "no errors" this morning...

The CF card is run pretty well read only. It's also in a slot on the
front of the server so I can change it really quickly.



--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
My posts (including this one) are my copyright and if @diy_forums on
Twitter wish to tweet them they can pay me £30 a post
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

If you are reading this from a web interface eg DIY Banter,
DIY Forum or Google Groups, please be aware this is NOT a forum, and
you are merely using a web portal to a USENET group. Many people block
posters coming from web portals due to perceived SPAM or inaneness.
For a better method of access, please see:

http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?title=Usenet


"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On Tuesday 08 January 2013 00:15 Bob Eager wrote in uk.d-i-y:

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:47:57 +0000, Tim Watts wrote:

Of a small Atom based fanless computer with a solid state disk that was
designed to be bombproof, getting a bad sector



and that sector being the inode containing the directory data for /sbin/

?!!



It was a bit worrying[1] when on reboot it said "/sbin/init not found"
(to non linux people, that's basically the program that boots everything
else after the kernel has initialised. Having that directory missing is
generally a Bad Thing (TM)


[1] As this is my router/firewall/DHCP server, I went ape****.


Luckily, I had a backup copy of / on another partition (and now on my
laptop) and managed to put /sbin back booting off a recovery USB stick.

I run mine off a CF card. And I have spares!


That's (almost) what I thought I was doing with an SSD - maybe they are
more
failure prone?...

I am running it close to the bone without fans - it's not a weedy
processor,
but it's in a case that is grid punched with holes over most of the top
and
sides. Knowing it *can* run without a fan, perhaps I should put a slow
quiet
one in just to drop the temps.

smartctl reported (for a long self test) "no errors" this morning...

If an area of the SSD has failed I presume that it has been remapped to one
of the very many spare areas included for just this eventuality.
Presumably also done by the SSD firmware and concealed from the real world.
So you shagged SSD is once more magically a virgin :-)

AFAICR this is one reason why SSDs are still best used as temporary storage
devices for transient data (but not too transient) as various bits die and
then are replaced by the large amount of spare memory tucked away in the
wings.
This doesn't stop people (myself included) using these as system discs but
there are a lot of sad stories about people having SSDs fail if you look at
reviews.

So - what are the odds?
I think that if you run with a full system on an SSD for a number of years
then there is a reasonable chance of filestore corruption at some level.
However I am too lazy at the moment to do anything specific about this.
Perhaps one should do an image backup and restore every 6 months?

Cheers

Dave R
--
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
[Not even bunny]

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

....snip...
If an area of the SSD has failed I presume that it has been remapped to one
of the very many spare areas included for just this eventuality.
Presumably also done by the SSD firmware and concealed from the real world.
So you shagged SSD is once more magically a virgin :-)

AFAICR this is one reason why SSDs are still best used as temporary storage
devices for transient data (but not too transient) as various bits die and
then are replaced by the large amount of spare memory tucked away in the
wings.
This doesn't stop people (myself included) using these as system discs but
there are a lot of sad stories about people having SSDs fail if you look at
reviews.

So - what are the odds?
I think that if you run with a full system on an SSD for a number of years
then there is a reasonable chance of filestore corruption at some level.
However I am too lazy at the moment to do anything specific about this.
Perhaps one should do an image backup and restore every 6 months?

----
FWIW, I'm a programmer and my employer has been swapping to SSD only PCs for
sometime now. We've certainly not seen issues and we hammer them hard with
software compilations etc. The gain in speed over a regular disk quite took
my breath away (a straight disk swap out, no other hardware changed).

But, especially older Intel drives don't support a feature called "TRIM" and
older OSes don't either. If I understand it correctly, TRIM is how an SSD
effectively clears old data so that new data can be written. When you
rewrite, the old data is marked "unused", the new data is written
_somewhere_else_ and at some point in the background, the old data area is
reinitialised.

Without TRIM, the disk gets slower and slower because if space is not
reclaimed, eventually rewrites have to do a full "clear, reinitialize,
write"; doing the reinitialize in the background is what keeps SSDs fast.

So, does your ATOM OS support TRIM? Work a check. BTW, why an SSD? Did
you really need such a large disk?

Paul DS

On Tuesday 08 January 2013 12:56 Paul D Smith wrote in uk.d-i-y:

...snip...
If an area of the SSD has failed I presume that it has been remapped to
one of the very many spare areas included for just this eventuality.
Presumably also done by the SSD firmware and concealed from the real
world. So you shagged SSD is once more magically a virgin :-)

AFAICR this is one reason why SSDs are still best used as temporary
storage devices for transient data (but not too transient) as various bits
die and then are replaced by the large amount of spare memory tucked away
in the wings.
This doesn't stop people (myself included) using these as system discs but
there are a lot of sad stories about people having SSDs fail if you look
at reviews.

So - what are the odds?
I think that if you run with a full system on an SSD for a number of years
then there is a reasonable chance of filestore corruption at some level.
However I am too lazy at the moment to do anything specific about this.
Perhaps one should do an image backup and restore every 6 months?

----
FWIW, I'm a programmer and my employer has been swapping to SSD only PCs
for
sometime now. We've certainly not seen issues and we hammer them hard
with
software compilations etc. The gain in speed over a regular disk quite
took my breath away (a straight disk swap out, no other hardware changed).

Hi,

What make of SSD would you recommend? Mine is Crucial - not fast nor
expensive.

But, especially older Intel drives don't support a feature called "TRIM"
and
older OSes don't either. If I understand it correctly, TRIM is how an SSD
effectively clears old data so that new data can be written. When you
rewrite, the old data is marked "unused", the new data is written
_somewhere_else_ and at some point in the background, the old data area is
reinitialised.

Without TRIM, the disk gets slower and slower because if space is not
reclaimed, eventually rewrites have to do a full "clear, reinitialize,
write"; doing the reinitialize in the background is what keeps SSDs fast.

So, does your ATOM OS support TRIM? Work a check. BTW, why an SSD? Did
you really need such a large disk?

I wanted a full blown debian system - I found OpenWRT (etc) too limiting.
It's not huge - 16GB would do. I went SSD because it should be more tolerant
in a read/write environment.

Re TRIM - not sure about Linux. I'll have to look that up. Is that related
to the new "SCSI Release block"[1] feature?

[1] So that underlying SANs know that they can truely delete and reclaim a
block in a thin volume setup

--
Tim Watts Personal Blog: http://www.dionic.net/tim/

If you are reading this from a web interface eg DIY Banter,
DIY Forum or Google Groups, please be aware this is NOT a forum, and
you are merely using a web portal to a USENET group. Many people block
posters coming from web portals due to perceived SPAM or inaneness.
For a better method of access, please see:

http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php?title=Usenet

"It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent
moral busybodies."

On Tuesday 08 January 2013 12:56 Paul D Smith wrote in uk.d-i-y:

...snip...
If an area of the SSD has failed I presume that it has been remapped to
one of the very many spare areas included for just this eventuality.
Presumably also done by the SSD firmware and concealed from the real
world. So you shagged SSD is once more magically a virgin :-)

AFAICR this is one reason why SSDs are still best used as temporary
storage devices for transient data (but not too transient) as various bits
die and then are replaced by the large amount of spare memory tucked away
in the wings.
This doesn't stop people (myself included) using these as system discs but
there are a lot of sad stories about people having SSDs fail if you look
at reviews.

So - what are the odds?
I think that if you run with a full system on an SSD for a number of years
then there is a reasonable chance of filestore corruption at some level.
However I am too lazy at the moment to do anything specific about this.
Perhaps one should do an image backup and restore every 6 months?

----
FWIW, I'm a programmer and my employer has been swapping to SSD only PCs
for
sometime now. We've certainly not seen issues and we hammer them hard
with
software compilations etc. The gain in speed over a regular disk quite
took my breath away (a straight disk swap out, no other hardware changed).


Us too. I can max out all 8 CPUs in a compile and the disk just sits
there idling, where spinning rust was running flat out. I often see the
performance chart scaled to the gigabyte/second range - which means I/Os
consistently in excess of 100MB/second. The best bit is that it
multitasks so much better than a disc disc as the seek time is zero.

I understand that the trim helps, but is not essential. The disc here,
for example, is 160GB. No way that's real, it has to be 192 with the 32
being used for spares and for erase-ahead. With Trim it hasn't just got
the unbroken bits of the 32Gb, it's got whatever trim has said is free.
Work machine is write limited by trim speed, this one doesn't have to
do so much.

On 08/01/2013 13:59, Tim Watts wrote:

What make of SSD would you recommend? Mine is Crucial - not fast nor
expensive.


For my home machine I bought Intel. Good reliability reports. Yes, I
have a backup, but (a) not every day and (b) it's a PITA to rebuild.

Andy

On 08/01/13 20:57, Andy Champ wrote:

Us too. I can max out all 8 CPUs in a compile and the disk just sits
there idling, where spinning rust was running flat out. I often see the
performance chart scaled to the gigabyte/second range - which means I/Os
consistently in excess of 100MB/second. The best bit is that it
multitasks so much better than a disc disc as the seek time is zero.

I can do that on a humble twincore + SATA. the key is having enough RAM
to cache the disk sectors..




--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.

On 08/01/2013 21:28, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 08/01/13 20:57, Andy Champ wrote:

Us too. I can max out all 8 CPUs in a compile and the disk just sits
there idling, where spinning rust was running flat out. I often see the
performance chart scaled to the gigabyte/second range - which means I/Os
consistently in excess of 100MB/second. The best bit is that it
multitasks so much better than a disc disc as the seek time is zero.

I can do that on a humble twincore + SATA. the key is having enough RAM
to cache the disk sectors..


We obviously have different compilers. This is MSVC2010, what are you using?

Andy