Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
So i'm testing one of the drives I got on amazon using an old computer. It started off promising, didn't get any errors when formating the drive, write speed using a usb adapter at 25mb/s... Then it dropped off to 7mb/s and the expected time shot up from 40hours to 156h๐คฃ
I'm going to let it run over night and see what happens in the morning. If I can get it to show 4tb without error I might still keep them to test out my geekworm pi nas, otherwise back to amazon you go!
7 MB/s is insane. That's 1000x slower than a real SSD.
It's probably either failed or they faked the size, and that's the average speed of the entire operation now. But yes, it's abysmal
Don't worry, it's much worse than that now. It's showing 1.63 now and estimated 611h until completion. These are going back to amazon
This is the usual behaviour of ultra cheap flash drives.
They have some cache to show a 'good' performance at the beginning, if your measurement goes only a very short time. Then only crawl.
Actually you want cache even in good drive. The difference is the slow flash chips in the cheap drives crippling out as soon as the cache is used up.
I might want to have a sit down and talk with your autocorrect about that first sentence!
Corrected.
If it starts fine, but performance drops off a cliff after a while, it might be a heat issue.
I ended up putting such a flaky drive in a bag and wrapping a flexible icepack around it.
Not a great solution, but kinda good enough to get some data off of it.
Might do better if I take the plastic cover off the enclosure... Might do better if I put a heat sink on it... Might do better if they weren't fake nvmes ๐คฃ๐คช
let me know if they actually end up having full capacity, because slow drives I can deal with. That price per TB is close enough to spinning metal to finally tip the scale for me towards SSDs
I will let you know in 20 days ๐ ๐คช๐คฃ
There is some software you can get to check for bad blocks and then mark them do not write. This will allow you to salvage as much of the drive as possible. I recently got a dead 4tb drive fully restored and working. I hope you are as lucky!
Sorry, I don't think I worded that properly, these are mew drives I got off amazon, 4tb for $65 each. i'm running a test to see if they're any good or pure garbage using an old computer at work ๐
Oh then you're cooked. Those are 100% scam drives.
Probably, I was just hopping amazon made a mistake on the price or something ๐คช
LOL
You could buy 20 of them and make a RAID. So their cache sizes add up, and the total crawl speed as well ๐
I have 5 of them, i was going to make a raid with my geekworm pi nas dunno how much faster that would make them
Cuz it's nit looking good....๐คฃ๐คฃ
This usually isn't a thing on SSDs.
It is. The SSDs have two methods of managing this. The first is to simply skip the bad block. The second is to replace the badblock address with a good block from the SSDs reserve block storage. This is all done by the SMART controller in the SSD.
This is correct, but it doesn't require manual intervention by the user.