Umm…can I have your old SSD?

January 21, 2012

The thought occurs to me that there is a lot of concern about the health of SSDs by admins who don’t have a lot of experience with them.

I don’t have a lot of experience with them either, but I’ve spent a decent amount of time learning how they work, why they fail, and reading about the various failure modes. The problem is that I have no hands-on time with old, failed, failing drives.

What I’d like is to see some failing (or old/slow/etc) drives first hand. My ultimate goal is to write a small SSD health check that can be plugged into Nagios (or whatever monitoring system you want to use). As of right now, there’s no SSD health check on Nagios Exchange, and I think one that actually did check would be valuable.

Of course, there will be limitations (like when the SSD is part of a RAID array, or really really old, or the drive is so dead that it doesn’t respond), but still, the lack of ANYTHING is kind of frustrating.

Since I’m not made of money and time, I can’t just go buy a bunch of SSDs and wait on them to die in interesting ways. This is where you come in :-) I’d be interested in taking (or borrowing, if you’d prefer) your old unhealthy drives. I can get my own reference shiny-new drive(s), but I’m more interested in drives that are long in the tooth, either because they’re just old, or because they’re slow from all of the writes that you’ve been putting them through, or whatever.

I’d prefer drives with the SMART extensions, but I’m not overly picky, I guess. Since I don’t need dozens, I can probably pick up shipping as long as you’re in North America.

If you can help me out with my little project (or have suggestions on how I can acquire drives like this), please drop me a line or comment on this story. Thanks!

Send this post to...

Posted in Storage, System Administration