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My SSDs - the good, the bad, and the ugly


sunrat

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My Linux installations on Samsung 850 EVO 500GB started getting catastrophic filesystem corruption. They would refuse to boot fully but recovered at first after fsck. After several boots they would not work at all. I suspected SSD failure but SMART extended test passed albeit CRC error count increased with subsequent checks. CRC errors can be bad connection or cable.

So I took the easy way out, perfect excuse to buy a new 1TB WD Blue nVME M2. I multiboot Win 10 so first downloaded the latest 1909 installer. DON"T DO THIS. My prior one was 1803 and MS have managed to make the process more tooth-pullingly excruciating. It is now impossible to set up without creating an MS account. Maybe can with a key but I didn't have this handy and was going to activate later. Ended up with 2 accounts, the MS one and a local one I created later. :(  Also there seems to be more "have fries with that" rubbish to wade through. So I spent several hours installing and tweaking but finally decided to restore an old backup image from a couple of months ago. Much better!

On with Debian Buster and AVLinux, both restored from Clonezilla images but given extra 10GB each because I could. Several more hours of pain trying to boot. chrooted into Debian to reinstall and update GRUB without success, "No EFI boot partition found". Tried rEFInd but couldn't complete boot there either. Eventually a lightbulb appeared in my head and subsequent edit of fstab to put correct ESP and swap UUIDs and we are away and all seems good now. :D

Have yet to plug in the old SSD maybe with a different SATA cable to see if that's all it was. Watch this space...

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securitybreach

Why did you not also clone and restore the window's installation as well? I did the same for someone last week at work and it worked perfectly.

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securitybreach

Wait... how did you restore a sata ssd to a nvme ssd? I tried to do the same a month ago on my main desktop but since nvme uses 4k sectors instead of the 512 that sata uses, it marked all the partitions as unknown when I restored so I had to do a reinstall. That was easy since I have all my configs backed up and package lists so it was a drop in reinstall.

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21 minutes ago, securitybreach said:

Why did you not also clone and restore the window's installation as well? I did the same for someone last week at work and it worked perfectly.

 

That's what I did eventually

Quote

finally decided to restore an old backup image from a couple of months ago

 

I didn't clone, rather restored individual partition images as I wanted to increase the partition sizes. No issue with sector sizes but I don't think that's a SATA/nVME thing anyway. My most recent 4TB SATA HDD uses 4096 sectors.

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V.T. Eric Layton

Well, we've had fun, eh?

 

One of these days, I'm going to have to learn all the ins and outs of SSDs, UEFI, Secure Boot, and all that good stuff. This machine that I built in '16 from parts stolen at 3AM from dead machines buried in the ol' churchyard is not going to last forever, I'm afraid.

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41 minutes ago, Mauser said:

@sunrat   How long did that SSD last?

 

As I said in the first post, I don't know yet if it's the SSD itself, bad cable, or just some software glitch. It may have started misbehaving after last time I took it to work to record a concert several weeks ago, maybe the vibration of transporting it loosened a connection. I will plug it back in soon and check it out further.

My older PC has an OCZ Vertex2 120GB SSD which is over 9 years old and is still going strong and used every day, only occasionally being switched off.

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securitybreach

That was my first thought as well. Data corruption doesn't mean that the drive is bad (especially after passing a S.M.A.R.T test). I would just format it and use it like normal.

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securitybreach

Heck I have a WD Black 1tb that has lasted for almost 14 years without any issues at all. I know that it is not an SSD but that is pretty impressive in my opinion. And its still used on my desktop with the other 9 harddrives (6 Sata, 2x Sata SSD and a NVME SSD install drive).

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16 minutes ago, securitybreach said:

That was my first thought as well. Data corruption doesn't mean that the drive is bad (especially after passing a S.M.A.R.T test). I would just format it and use it like normal.

 

Quite possibly a corrupt partition table. Hopefully a new PT will bring it back to life.

 

I also have several WD 1TB Black HDs still going strong, oldest being 11 or 12 years. I just checked and it has 63492 hours uptime! The new 1TB SSD cost substantially less than what those HDs cost back then. 😎

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securitybreach
1 minute ago, sunrat said:

 

Quite possibly a corrupt partition table. Hopefully a new PT will bring it back to life.

 

I also have several WD 1TB Black HDs still going strong, oldest being 11 or 12 years. I just checked and it has 63492 hours uptime! The new 1TB SSD cost substantially less than what those HDs cost back then. 😎

 

For sure. The original WD Blacks were very high end drives. They may of costs more but time has shown that they were some of the best drives available

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Hello,

 

When setting up the account in the Windows 10 Version 1909 installer, just select the domain account option.  You will be prompted to select a username, password and password reset questions without having to create or enter a Microsoft account.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

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Thanks Aryeh. I already restored my older backup over it now which was better as it had a bunch of customisations I didn't have to redo. Will remember that for next time though. ;)

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securitybreach
2 hours ago, goretsky said:

Hello,

 

When setting up the account in the Windows 10 Version 1909 installer, just select the domain account option.  You will be prompted to select a username, password and password reset questions without having to create or enter a Microsoft account.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

Nice tip, thanks

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  • 2 weeks later...

Finally got around to plugging the temperamental EVO850 back in. Booted Debian from the new SSD setup but the EVO was nowhere to be seen. Booted Parted Magic and same MIA. On a final hunch I replaced the SATA cable and it seemed the UEFI detected it but couldn't find EFI bootloader even though new SSD with ESP was still present, so boot failed and went to emergency mode! The WD M2 one was still 1st priority in UEFI boot order though 🤔 .

So I booted PM again and deleted the old ESP from the EVO and tried again, still the same error. Getting frustrated now, so booted PM once again and created a new partition table on the EVO which deleted everything on it of course. Reboot and Debian boots fine and detects the newly created partition on the EVO. So all copacetic in sunrat's brain now! (brain is that computer's hostname). 😎😉

Guess it was just a dodgy/loose cable after all. It was a non-latching one and appeared to be lower quality than the others I have. Will ensure to use latching ones in future. Oh what fun we have, playing with things of which we know just enough to be dangerous! At least it was a good excuse to triple the amount of SSD on that machine. 😁

 

On a similar note, I thought I messed up the software on our $100,000 audio mixing console at work the other day. It runs embedded Windows XP and has a startup program called ReadyOn which runs the console surface software and sets up the environment. It's been displaying an explorer window which it shouldn't and the boss and production manager haven't been able to work it out. I had some spare time before the show so had another look. "Flush ReadyOn Cache" sounded like a good contender so I ran it. Turns out that also disables autoloading of the console surface, PANIC! I was able to load it manually for the show, phew. A little searching the interwebz found a manufacturers document that had in red, "Distributor use only, do not let users do this!" But as I'd done half of it, the disable bit, I figured the enable bit should work too. So I ran it after the show and it worked fine. Phew, I really didn't want to tell the boss I broke the console software! 😨😌 Now they love me because I fixed something that eluded them for ages. 😉

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33 minutes ago, securitybreach said:

Nice but I hope that the XP embedded machine is not on the internet, otherwise it is already 0wnd.

 

Of course it's not. Only external connection is via MADI to the AD/DA racks. And a couple of analog audio connections.

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securitybreach
1 minute ago, sunrat said:

 

Of course it's not. Only external connection is via MADI to the AD/DA racks. And a couple of analog audio connections.

 

Ah, good deal :thumbup:

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I'm going to our local distributor's expo next week where they are launching the new successor to our model consoles, which were released about 8 years ago. I'm sure even a non audio pro type person would appreciate the beauty in design.

 

console-3746.jpg

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On 2/3/2020 at 4:02 PM, securitybreach said:

Sorry not 4k, it uses variable sector sizes from 512 to 4224 bytes

was it mentioned that Samsung Migration will do SSD->nvme ?

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securitybreach
6 hours ago, crp said:

was it mentioned that Samsung Migration will do SSD->nvme ?

 

I do not think so but I could never use that as it is intended for windows systems. For windows users, that could be a useful tool to use if you trust Samsung with your data B)

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I used it once to transfer a friend's Win 7 system from HDD to Samsung SATA SSD. Worked perfectly but IIRC it only works for Samsung SSDs.

It's likely you could do the same cloning with dd or Clonezilla. I doubt it would make any difference whether it is NVMe or SATA SSD.

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securitybreach
32 minutes ago, sunrat said:

I used it once to transfer a friend's Win 7 system from HDD to Samsung SATA SSD. Worked perfectly but IIRC it only works for Samsung SSDs.

It's likely you could do the same cloning with dd or Clonezilla. I doubt it would make any difference whether it is NVMe or SATA SSD.

 

Clonezilla didn't work when I tried to clone the entire drive to another. It made the partitions but they all were identified as Unknown and would not boot. Mind you, I clone my entire drive every quarter and it always worked flawlessly until I did it from SATA SSD to NVME

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13 hours ago, sunrat said:

I'm going to our local distributor's expo next week where they are launching the new successor to our model consoles, which were released about 8 years ago. I'm sure even a non audio pro type person would appreciate the beauty in design.

 

console-3746.jpg

 

That is pretty elegant and sexy sunrat!  almost makes me want one, although I'm 100% certain it won't be cost effective in my personal studio space!  LOL!

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securitybreach
44 minutes ago, Hedon James said:

 

That is pretty elegant and sexy sunrat!  almost makes me want one, although I'm 100% certain it won't be cost effective in my personal studio space!  LOL!

 

Yeah, I have no idea what it does what I would use it for but man, is it cool looking!!!!!!

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8 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

Clonezilla didn't work when I tried to clone the entire drive to another. It made the partitions but they all were identified as Unknown and would not boot. Mind you, I clone my entire drive every quarter and it always worked flawlessly until I did it from SATA SSD to NVME

 

It sort of worked on mine, although I'd installed Win 10 first then abandoned that to restore the old one over it so it still used the ESP from the new install. I used REFInd to boot the restored Debian and installed GRUB from there.

 

  

7 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

Yeah, I have no idea what it does what I would use it for but man, is it cool looking!!!!!!

 

It's an audio mixing console, one model below top of the line. Surely you've been to a concert and seen the sound engineer surrounded by electronics amidst the audience. That's their prime tool of the trade.

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