It's been over two years since this was first identified... since this apparently affected many makes and models of SSDs, it would be nice to know if my laptop could be affected and if there's anything I could do about it.
This will not affect your laptop, all of the models affected by this are enterprise SAS SSDs.
Of course your SSD might have some other firmware bug that would eat your data, all you can do is search for the model number and see if the manufacturer has issued any notices/firmware updates.
There was at least one consumer SSD with a similar failure mode, the Crucial M4 SATA drive, unless you updated the firmware it would crash after 5200 cumulative power on hours.
That drive launched in 2011 though so there probably aren't that many still in active use which still haven't reached ~7 months of uptime.
That problem became known a decade ago, so it's somewhat surprising to see such a similar bug now.
This new one is worse because the drive cannot be used after reaching the magic number of hours. In the Crucial M4 case the firmware could be updated even after the bug struck.
Edit: sorry, probably put that offensively. mikiem said about the HN drives: “These were made by SanDisk (SanDisk Optimus Lightning II) and the number of hours is between 39,984 and 40,032...” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031428 Without knowing parts of a codebase are shared between SanDisk devices, it is hard to say that enterprise SAS devices have absolutely no code shared with consumer devices. So just the commenter’s opinion unless the commenter has knowledge of writing Sandisk firmware. “HPE and Dell both used the same upstream supplier (believed to be SanDisk) for SSD controllers” https://www.anandtech.com/show/15673/dell-hpe-updates-for-40...
> Without knowing parts of a codebase are shared between SanDisk devices, it is hard to say that enterprise SAS devices have absolutely no code shared with consumer devices.
Even if the code containing this bug was shared between consumer and enterprise drives, it's not reasonable to assume that it would take SanDisk multiple years to check whether their consumer drives are also affected. The lack of a follow-up report from SanDisk is good evidence that their other products are not affected.
Yeah, I agree it is very unlikely to affect someone’s laptop.
However I dislike a black and white “This will not” absolute fact statement: even if based on reasonable assumptions which is what appears to be the case versus detailed knowledge.
Most laptops don’t run their SSDs 24/7, and unless a manufacturer’s error affects a lot of consumers, we often don’t find out the cause of consumer equipment errors in my experience.
If the OP has a laptop older than 2020, with an SSD with a crucial chipset (especially if SATA), and they leave it on most of the time, then maybe check SMART hours.
I've been searching "40000 hour SSD" since the HN downtime. There's a lot of bug reports besides this one and I'm fairly confident it only affects enterprise too.
I got bit by this with iPhone backups. I did a phone trade in and followed the backup before trading in instructions. Problem is after the trade in the backup failed to restore due to an unknown error. The whole manual syncing and backing up with a cable workflow with Apple is super fickle and riddled with bugs.
Luckily I had Time Machine backups of my iOS backups and I managed to avoid losing too much data.
As a sidenote it seems like Apple has pretty much neglected their offline backup and syncing workflow to drive more people to just pay for iCloud storage. Half the time my iPhone takes hours just to get detected by the mac when plugged in.
Man, Time Machine can fail just as badly. Unknown errors and there is no help or documentation or way to fix it. Carbon Copy Cloner [0] is the way to go for retaining sanity. Absolutely excellent documentation for pretty much any use case. And it works reliably. Not affiliated but after having had terrible experiences with Time Machine I feel compelled to bring it up every time I come across the topic.
While I don't like how annoying Apple is with service upselling (iCloud, Music, Arcade), at least they moved iPhone backup from iTunes to Finder. So their local iPhone backup process is being maintained over time.
I don't have issues with my computer (PC or Mac) detecting my iPhone. Generally need to make sure iPhone is unlocked after plugging it in. What is tough is the large size of my iPhone (X gb) and how small my Mac's HD is (2X gb).
I’ve changed iphones many times and the issue still persists for me. The only reliable way to get photos synced or iphone deteced in finder is to turn on airplane mode for some reason. Must be a bug with wifi syncing.
You actually bring up another issue. There is no obvious way to backup iPhone locally to an external hard drive. So either pay the mac SSD storage tax or the icloud tax.
Depending on your usecase you can integrate using your backups occasionally into your normal data processing.
Again, depends on usecase but then it becomes integral to your existing workflow instead of an addendum that you end up forgetting to do
The whole purpose is to make the failing of one be effectively extremely noisy and irritating
It's like what I do with raid. I have a script that will shut the machine down on drive failure and then will use dialog(1) to say something like "hey bozo replace the fucking drive first" when you boot it up and then it will shutdown again and be unusable.
Make the complaining show stopping, loud, rude, and disruptive. Because if the next one fails you're screwed
