=== START
, YOU COULD SKIP TO NEXT === for some mildly interesting technical stuff !!!
Well, to start I seem to be able to get the purpose of my project here, that is a cheap, silent, but reliable high capacity NAS, for the cheap and reliable I'm willing to sacrifice the speed and the multimedia capabilities.
So I'm not making a real-time 3D 4K/120fps video encoding system for a high-end porn studio
, neither some kind of fast office/desktop publishing machine, also not a gaming gear.
It's a NAS, speaking of which, now, in this moment, there are established companies selling frigging single ARM core boxes for close to 1000EUR as high performance NAS!!!
And you gentlebeings are proposing me Ryzens, modern high-performance (and high-consumption) motherboards and top shelf (and price) Samsung EVO with 500MB/s speed for the frigging boot disk
!!!
What should I do with this monsters ?!?! The connection with the house router will be via 1Gb network interface (the router has only one available) and the access will be mostly via wireless with 3-4 devices accessing it simultaneously. If all this will get over 100MB/s I'll be amazed. Maybe one iSCSI mount with my workstation laptop that is wired connected and that's it. The data disks in the RAID will need to be a bit less crappy, but not the boot disk (btw. I've started the silver box, with an Intenso (crap de la crap) USB stick, goes in 21s to the graphical desktop of Linux Mint 18)
=== END
Good, now let's go to some interesting stuff before is too late, so I've heated and destroyed two SandDisk SSD Plus 120GB and one really old OCZ Agility 2 120GB.
Contrary to popular opinion in ALL THREE cases what failed was the controller and NEVER the flash. Doing dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=100M count=100 for random data and then doing SHA256 until the last moment ALWAYS produced the same hash value.
Then some DISK NOT READY and whatever other controller related failures appeared, then the disks disappeared for ever, that is, the disk's controller became inert and was never recognized again. One of the controllers even failed spectacularly spitting out smoke on the second cycle of heating long before reaching 90C, around 70-75.
So this kind of settles the mystery of failing disks that are not seen at all by the bios, the controller itself dies and it seem that the most sensitive part is the SATA differential transceiver block. The OCZ disk has TSOP flash and I could bet that if I unsolder it and test it it will still be a good flash. Of course that in the long run the storage quality of the flash degrades with high temperatures, but the controller will be long dead before this happens.
The second big discovery: these cheap consumer SSDs are
DESIGNED to fail, please look at the picture of the PCBs, the small ones are the SanDisks and the big one is the OCZ (at its time was really friggin expensive), these guys are small and thin, the cases are HIGHLY ISOLATED, hermetically sealed plastic cases where none of the chips were touching the case body and they were kept at a distance by thin bumps. Of course exactly ZERO air circulation as well inside the case.
The OCZ has 1/2 of the case of metal but no thermal contact with the chips and the metal is ON THE OTHER SIDE of the controller so I think that a huge improvement could be made by just discarding the cases and thermally bound the boards on some metal surfaces to serve as proper radiators.
Have a look at the boards picture and let me know your opinion, now is too late, but tomorrow I can picture the plastic shells as well (and a thick plastic it is, was a pain to open it).
Cheers,
DC1MC