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We just lost 3TB of data on a SanDisk Extreme SSD (www.theverge.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

And that's why RAID is a good idea.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

For availability, yes, but RAID is not a substitute for proper backup procedures. E.g. - offsite, cloud, or automated scheduled local backups, or even regular data integrity checks.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

True, but it will protect you from a single drive failing like this.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don’t think the drive actually failed. The article said that the files disappeared from the drive one-by-one, which sounds like a firmware bug to me.

You could theoretically have the same problem due to a buggy RAID controller or driver.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I don’t think the drive actually failed. The article said that the files disappeared from the drive one-by-one

It didn't fail in the sense of reporting an I/O error, but it did fail in the sense that the bytes previously written to it can't be read any more.

which sounds like a firmware bug to me.

Could be. SSD firmware is pretty notorious for data loss.

You could theoretically have the same problem due to a buggy RAID controller or driver.

Which is why I don't trust hardware RAID controllers, only software RAID, preferably with per-block checksums so that the software RAID controller knows which copy is the good copy.

The author is using macOS, whose APFS file system has those features. Linux's btrfs does too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Raid 0 right?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

RAID 1. Raid 0 stripes data between disks, meaning you get much faster I/O speeds but if one disk fails, you lose it all. RAID 1 is when you have 2 (or more) disks and the data is mirrored between both. So if one does, you’ve got a perfect copy of it on the other disk. RAID 0 = “striped”, RAID 1 = “mirrored”