Running FreeBSD on M.2 SSD

[Karl Denninger]

On 2/25/2020 9:53 AM, John Kennedy wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 11:07:48AM +0000, Pete French wrote:
>> I have often wondered if ZFS is more aggressive with discs, because until
>> very recently any solid state drive I have used ZFS on broke very quicky. ...
>    I've always wondered if ZFS (and other snapshotting file systems) would help
> kill SSD disks by locking up blocks longer than other filesystems might.  For
> example, I've got snapshot-backups going back, say, a year then those blocks
> that haven't changed aren't going back into the pool to be rewritten (and
> perhaps favored because of low write-cycle count).  As the disk fills up, the
> blocks that aren't locked up get reused more and more, leading to extra wear
> on them.  Eventually one of those will get to the point of erroring out.
>
>    Personally, I just size generously but that isn't always an option for
> everybody.

I have a ZFS RaidZ2 on SSDs that has been running for several /years 
/without any problems.  The drives are Intel 730s, which Intel CLAIMS 
don't have power-loss protection but in fact appear to; not only do they 
have caps in them but in addition they pass a "pull the cord out of the 
wall and then check to see if the data is corrupted on restart" test on 
a repeated basis, which I did several times before trusting them.

BTW essentially all non-data-center SSDs fail that test and some fail it 
spectacularly (destroying the OS due to some of the in-flight data being 
comingled on an allocated block with something important; if the 
read/erase/write cycle interrupts you're cooked as the "other" data that 
was not being modified gets destroyed too!) -- the Intels are one of the 
very, very few that have passed it.

-- 
-- Karl Denninger
/The Market-Ticker/
S/MIME Email accepted and preferred
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