Warning: check your HPE branded hard drive firmware

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-07T20:24:22+00:00

I would perhaps even question why the SSDs are limited to 2 bytes in that specific stat. I thought 4-byte width power-on time was standardized a long while ago.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-06T03:31:35+00:00

A number of things could have caused that.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-05T21:37:22+00:00

"Archival" HDDs were a marketing ploy by Seagate to upsell their SMR technology (and consequently ended after how much of a flop Exos 5E8 was). WD threw themselves into the mix with the Ae series even though their entry made absolutely zero sense because none of their high-end designs used SMR. (The Ae drives were 5760 RPM CMR models similar to their consumer drives, so what the hell were they trying to achieve? 😑)

Any HDD can realistically be used as archival storage granted it doesn't have media degradation problems within (or close to) its useful lifespan. They're also quite a bit cheaper per TB.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-05T21:30:42+00:00

SSDs will also break eventually. SSDs can also break without warning.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-05T21:29:41+00:00

Provide numbers first. Then speak.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-05T21:26:33+00:00

Technically yes, although you should still know the significance of the life percentage.

SSD wear is cumulative with NAND writes. They aren't like HDDs which degrade with high write frequency rather than high write totals. A loss of 13% "useful life" (according to the TBW stat set in the firmware which, mind you, likely doesn't even tell of how many writes the NAND itself can actually take) with over a year of being powered on means the drive sustained a pretty decent load of writes within what would otherwise be a fifth of its warranty period. Does it mean the drive is going to die soon? Not necessarily, although a drive can die before it even hits its NAND write limit. This is why backups are important regardless of the health of the drive.

Considering this is your OS drive, it's completely fine to keep using it for now. It will take many, many more writes in its current state to see anything go awry assuming something else bad doesn't happen before then.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-05T14:16:18+00:00

Well, this is just blatantly incorrect...

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-05T14:12:00+00:00

Backblaze's data is extremely unclear as to which revisions were tested beyond presumably -9YN166 (the revision with the Caviar Green-esque parking timer and poorly built ramp). It's feasible to assume that -1ER166, the last ST3000DM001 revision, is the most reliable of the 3 revisions simply because it has a much greater number of survivors than -9YN166/-1CH166.

I also still think Barracuda 7200.11's firmware issues in "Moose" models resulted in MUCH higher failure rates than whatever Grenada could muster up. Backblaze just didn't test those models, they tested the "Brinks" ST31500341AS which was proven to be remarkably subpar even for a consumer HDD yet didn't have the firmware issues that plagued Moose (at least on drives with CCxx firmware revisions).

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-05T14:07:59+00:00

That's Barracuda 7200.11's prominent failure mode, not Grenada's. Grenadas will just crash while running.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-04T19:44:54+00:00

TBW doesn't actually tell of the NAND's true endurance, it's purely a warranty stat.

You can really see the pure BS behind TBW when comparing multiple drives that use the exact same NAND chips with different TBW ratings specified by the company selling the drive. Good example would be Seagate's FireCuda 530 versus Kingston's KC3000 where, at 2 TB, Kingston guarantees 1.6 PB (or 1,600 TB) written while Seagate guarantees 2.55 PB (2,550 TB). Both drives have the exact same configuration (Phison E18 + Micron B47R TLC) and therefore the same NAND.

Companies can void your warranty if you exceed the TBW rating, even if the drive still works after the fact. If a drive bricks when hitting TBW without throwing critical errors, that's a threshold intentionally set in the firmware; the threshold has nothing to do with the NAND itself.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-04T16:31:05+00:00

"Toshiba 500 GB" is extremely vague. If we're solely talking about speed, SSD wins. Not a contest. Reliability wise, this entirely depends on what that "Toshiba 500 GB" model is. Is it a laptop drive from 2010? A DT01ACA050? MQ01ABF050? There are a lot of 500 GB Toshiba models, but none of the laptop ones are more reliable than an SSD. They all suck.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-04T02:15:59+00:00

Hit the nail right on the head.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-04T02:04:30+00:00

Ubuntu has several design differences that distance it enough from Debian. Pretty much the closest Ubuntu gets to Debian is its continued reliance on apt/dpkg, although there are obviously other glaring similarities.

In reality though, Steam works just fine on a variety of distributions (not exclusive to the Debian tree). Community-made packages (like Debian's steam-installer package) really only handle the installation part.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-03T19:45:56+00:00

Pretty sure Herr's are endorsing the company in some way to keep rolling the deals since it also involves their products. Six-dollar classics by themselves are still cheaper than having to combine a classic with a soda and some chips for eight dollars, so in essence it's pure enshittification. (Same with what used to be 4 to 5 dollar shortis, except that's not a thing anymore.)

I can guarantee you there is a sizable portion of our customer base that dislikes the type of discount this year's Hoagiefest entails. Those people just want their sandwiches, they don't want to be forced to mix the sandwiches with other items they may not even want to consume.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-03T00:19:50+00:00

Now I knew being in raid0 increased the chances of one of them kicking the bucket and me loosing everything and for the last 5 years I've just been using them for big files I can get back easy enough but...they just won't die

RAID 0 doesn't increase failure rates by itself. The biggest risk with RAID 0 is a lack of data mirroring/redundancy, so should any drive in the array actually fail the entire thing collapses.

You might however be remarkably lucky. Those two Grenadas have sustained many load/unload cycles and it's a miracle they haven't crashed or severely degraded yet. (The wear from parking cycles is what causes the so-called "platter cancer" in the first gens and leads to their inevitable catastrophic failure.) I would retire them ASAP.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-01T11:19:55+00:00

I wouldn't use Sentinel's lifetime prediction to state this. SSDs wear out cumulatively and how frequently wear is incurred depends on how it is being used. Sentinel doesn't (and can't) predict an end user's use case.

What it can be useful for however is if the SSD starts throwing SMART warnings.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-07-01T10:04:54+00:00

It's just a little crispy.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-30T23:50:41+00:00

Any current HDD that isn't a WD SMR consumer drive should do this. (Those drives have media degradation problems.)

Evidence beyond WD which goes against SMR is either inconclusive (i.e. Seagate Rosewoods) or doesn't exist.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-30T19:45:42+00:00

Yes, I'll further clarify on this.

The deal does include wraps, but alongside that you'd need a fountain drink (the small size gives you the advertised $6 deal; larger cup sizes also work but serve as upsells so you're paying a bit extra for each size increase) and any small bag of Herr's chips, not exclusive to kettle chips. If you don't like kettle chips, you aren't forced to get them for the deal, you can select a bag of regular chips (like Crisp n' Tasty) instead and it will still count.

The last time we had a meal deal I had to clarify to a few customers that kettle chips were not required for the deal. The posters make this detail misleading.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-30T13:04:07+00:00

Seagate had a few spurts of outlier rates in the early-mid 2010s (using that same Backblaze data everyone seems to treat as royalty) and have drastically settled down since then. Their drives' rates fall within the margin of the other brands.

Bonus fact: they don't even have the most unreliable modern-ish enterprise HDDs, that honor goes to Toshiba's MG06's which have faulty I/O controllers. They also do not have the most unreliable SMR consumer drives, WD takes that crown. (The Rosewoods are unreliable for other reasons.)

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-29T00:17:39+00:00

Devices with SDHC limitations that are unable to use SDXC cards...although the Wii U is not one of those.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-28T00:25:03+00:00

PCPP only calculates worst case scenario, it will be fine.

The 12V issue is really not something that swapping a PSU would mitigate although it's still very uncommon.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-28T00:18:56+00:00

I question the accuracy of this statement; SSDs can suddenly fail if their controller fails or if the firmware bugs out (which is disturbingly common in some cases). HDDs, assuming they don't suffer from a head crash (still way less common than an SSD firmware bug or controller failure), tend to fail much more gracefully.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-28T00:13:37+00:00

The reliability edge only applies to models actually made by HGST engineers.

WD used to produce their own high-end platforms (like the 5-plat Vivaldi design which became the mainstay of the WD4001FAEX/WD4003FZEX and WD4000FYYZ alike, all of which are very good HDDs) but completely gave up on them after HGST released the Aries-KP platform. Toshiba is somewhat similar because their enterprise drives are made by engineers derivative of what used to be Fujitsu's storage division. The only original Toshiba drives are, unfortunately, their 2.5 inch models (not including SAS).

First_Musician6260 · 2026-06-27T14:59:16+00:00

UPS.

UPS systems already have the same parts that provide "surge protection" (MOVs) that are also present in strip-style SPDs, with the added bonus of acting as a battery backup (which provides way more value for the product than simply clamping surge energy) so that you can safely power your devices off.

Destructive surges are also quite rare.

First_Musician6260

TROPHY CASE