SSDs vs. Power outages

Just been reading a recent article over at ExtremeTech.

SOURCE: Link

On my way to buy a good UPS battery backup.

 

It's a shame they don't provide the model details, I'd be interested to know which ones come out doing well!

I supposed I expected that there could be problems with power failures, but didn't expect an SSD to be bricked from something like that. I don't have a UPS at home, but perhaps should consider it for my NAS.

 

I'd strongly recommend a UPS, even for normal HDDs they can prevent data and/or OS corruption from power interruptions. For SSDs it's even more important given they can be handling much larger amounts of data at the time of the power loss.

Ontop of the larger amount of data, SSDs are typically performing self-maintenance routines when idle. So even if the user is doing nothing some data is still being read from then rewritten to the SSD as the drive cleans itself up. Many SSDs don't actually use the onboard DRAM cache to store user data (such as Intel), instead in all SSDs the cache is used to load the mapping table / indirection table for fast lookups with LBA-to-physical address mapping. Sure a copy is always kept on the NAND, but any newly modified files run the risk of corruption if the indirection table isn't able to finish paging back to the NAND during a power failure (it's typically in the 100MB+ range or even more depending on the type of indirection table used).

 

Well, I guess I jinxed it! On Saturday we had a storm a lightning hit very close to our house - knocking out the phoneline, blowing the router/amp/ps3/some light fixtures and other things. I've never had anything like this happen, but as our phoneline and router are both gone, I rushed out and bought a 4G mobile broadband kit to stay connected (it's surprisingly good!).

As luck would have it, our NAS and PCs were undamaged (thankfully) - but it reminded me of this thread. I ordered a APC BE700G-UK and it's just arrived, so I'll be setting this up for the NAS later on today. I may even go the whole hog and purchase one for our PCs, but once I've fixed the damaged electrical stuff.

 

Hey Ian.... sorry to hear of the misfortune.
Hope you get everything squared away quickly.
Just like the member a couple of posts above this one. It never happens...... until it happens.

 

Wow Ian, sorry to hear of your losses! As bad as that is it sounds, it is fortunate that you didn't lose even more.

Don't forget to route your internet line + modem + router through that APC as well!

 

Thanks guys . Yup, you're right were quite lucky that it didn't destroy and data, so it served as an effective warning!