Here’s the thing. That SSD controller is the interface between you and those blocks.
If it decides, by some arbitrary measurement, as defined by some logic within its black box firmware, that it should stop returning all blocks, then it will do so, and you have almost no recourse.
This is a very common failure mode of SSDs. As a consequence of some failed blocks (likely exceeding a number of failed blocks, or perhaps the controller’s own storage failed), drives will commonly brick themselves.
Perhaps you haven’t seen it happen, or your SSD doesn’t do this, or perhaps certain models or firmwares don’t, but some certainly do, both from my own experience, and countless accounts I’ve read elsewhere, so this is more common than you might realise.
This is correct, you still have to go through firmware to gain access to the block/page on “disk” and if the firmware decides the block is invalid than it fails.
You can sidestep this by bypassing the controller on a test bench though. Pinning wires to the chips. At that point it’s no longer an SSD.
The mechanism is usually that the SSD controller requires that some work be done before your read - for example rewriting some access tables to record 'hot' data.
That work can't be done because there is no free blocks. However, no space can be freed up because every spare writable block is bad or is in some other unusable state.
The drive is therefore dead - it will enumerate, but neither read nor write anything.
I don't think this is correct; it could read the flash block containing the [part of the] table in question, update it in memory, erase that block, then rewrite it into the same block.
I really wish this responsibility was something hoisted up into the FS and not a responsibility of the drive itself.
It's ridiculous (IMO) that SSD firmware is doing so much transparent work just to keep the illusion that the drive is actually spinning metal with similar sector write performance.
Linux supports raw flash, called an MTD device (memory technology device). It's often used in embedded systems. And it has MTD-native filesystems such as ubifs. But it's only really used in embedded systems because... PC SSDs don't expose that kind of interface. (Nor would you necessarily want them to. A faulty driver would quietly brick your hardware in a matter of minutes to hours)
When only a number of 4 kB blocks cannot be read, if the amount of affected data is less than the amount of added redundancy the archive file can still be repaired.
For instance, if you have a 40 GB backup archive with 10% redundancy, 4 GB of data, i.e. one million 4 kB data blocks can be unreadable and you can still repair the archive and recover the complete content.
It is true that the entire SSD or HDD can become bricked. The solution for this, as I have already written in my previous comment, is to duplicate any SSD/HDD used for archival purposes, which I always do.
Yes, and? HDD controllers dying and head crashes are a thing too.
At least in the ‘bricked’ case it’s a trivial RMA - corrupt blocks tend to be a harder fight. And since ‘bricked’ is such a trivial RMA, manufacturers have more of an incentive to fix it or go broke, or avoid it in the first place.
This is why backups are important now; and always have been.
Not as far as I can tell, where intended is ‘as any user would reasonably expect’. Bricking the drive (can’t even read) because of too many errors is not what most users would ever want.
Some would (enterprise maybe), but even then they’d want deterministic data deletes too, which doesn’t sound like are happening.
You can argue that controllers shouldn't behave that way. But they do, it's not a bug, and it's not a dead controller. It's a perfectly functional controller's response to dead blocks.
The definition of functional in the context of the discussion is that in works in the way the manufacture explicitly designed it work, in a standard industry practice fashion, not as an unforeseen bug or malfunction.
If you read the relevant docs you will see how this is implemented and maybe realize that locking your entire database for a write transaction isn’t something that works for a whole lot of cases. Of course multiple readers are allowed, but multiple writers even to different tables still contend for the same lock (that doesn’t work on all file systems). There isn’t table-level locking, let alone row level locking.
Not an answer to your question, but an indicator of shared culture: Tesla vehicles also don’t support IPv6 whatsoever.
Things you might use an internet connection for in your Tesla include triggering air con remotely, live traffic and satellite maps, streaming music or online radio, web browsing, or YouTube/Netflix/Disney+ clients.
It completely refuses to use IPv6 over mobile or wi-fi. Also it refuses to access anything over IPv4 (apart from DNS) which resolves to an RFC1918 address, even if it's connected to said RFC1918 network.
So yes, Starlink and Tesla are different companies, but I see cultural parallels which I'm sure surprises nobody.
It was strange, because it was titled like “how to play this music”, except clearly it was just a MIDI file piped through a visualisation into the video; as a musician I know it’s useless for the task at hand.
Presumably the author has automated this by scraping tons of free MIDI files, rendering them to video, prepending a generic video intro, and hoping to cash in.
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility.
> Nobody is being forced to use the app.
If there’s a cost difference, I’d say that “forced” is an unfairly neutral word to use.
SA is charging upwards of $3000 (for 1 adult, plus $1000 each additional adult, plus $500 per child) for hotel quarantine [1], and though I can’t find a definitive source, your link does say it is intended to be a “cost effective alternative to medi-hotel quarantine”.
So for a family of 2 adults, 2 kids, being charged $5000 to avoid using the app isn’t real freedom. If it means the difference between putting food on the table or not, it’s no choice at all.
My guess is you didn't read there are three options. In most countries of the world (including mine) you get only two options, yet in Australia three. Two of them being free of cost: at home with human checks, or at home with app checks. Please take down your costs strawman, it's not helping the debate.
Not the O.P., but speaking from experience, yes, a thousand times yes.
Here in Sydney, Australia, both office and WFH are available at my work. I'll have anywhere between 0% and 90% of my team in the office depending on the day or week.
In my experience, even being the only one in the office is a thousand times better than WFH.
Whether teammates are WFH affects me less than whether I'm WFH.
It is supposed to be an international forum, but in practice it is a local group for San Francisco Bay Area. Consider how often articles about housing issues in Bay Area make it to the front page, compared to Vancouver, London, and Tokyo. HN is international in the sense that anyone can access and participate in it. But in practice, mostly SF Bay Area residents do.
I see participatants from all over the world here all the time. They usually qualify things with phrases like "where I'm from" or "in [insert country here].
It's only the Americans that think they're the center of the world.
I used to watch this Japanese show "Why did you come to Japan?" where a camera crew hangs out at Narita Airport and ambushes unsuspecting foreigners with that question and try to tag along on the journey of people they think are there for an interesting reason. When everyone introduces themselves they say the country they are from, except Americans who always say which state they are from and never the country. I found that particularly interesting. So, I just assume it's a deeply ingrained cultural thing to treat "America as default".
As an American expatriate I'm always shocked or bemused by the US-centric comments I get from family.
I live in East Asia, which is by no measure a cultural or technological backwater, and was surprised to hear my mother say, two days ago, "you must get YouTube over there...".
For some more perspective, I'm the most successful member of my family (from a financial pov) and from the condo I live in to the car I drive, I have nicer things than my parents ever did. I'm the first in the family -- and this is something I only considered just now -- to sends his kids to a good / expensive private school.
Though I don't lord it over them, my life is way more advanced / cushy than theirs. But from their point of view I'm not in the US and therefore don't have access to what they consider the gold standard of civilization.
And this point of view has not changed even though my parents have experienced my life in Asia first hand. Truly bizarre blind spot.
When I first moved to China ~10 years ago, I mentioned to whomever I was on the phone with back home that I needed to go grab some cash and that I might lose the call when I got in the lift. They asked where I planned to get money in the middle of the night, and were surprised to learn that ATM technology had indeed made it to "the Orient."
These days most people just ask if I've eaten a dog.
I obviously wasn't around back then, but even today the pace of modernization in China is astounding; I can only imagine what it must've been like in Deng Xiaoping's later years.
I usually cut them slack unless they're jerks about it. A lot haven't even got a passport. That's usually fine as well: The USA is a big place. Not even talking just actual size. There are a lot of people with diverse ways of living and circumstances. But the place is so physically huge you could spend your entire life exploring it and still not run out of places to find new things and people to see and meet.
If it helps, think of every US state as if it was a european country. You might lazily think they are all the same but scratch the surface and there's a lot of difference.
So yeah, its fine for someone to say they're from California. You already know they're from the land of High Fructose Corn Syrup so why be nasty about it?
It really isn't so diverse though. Same language, same retail and restaurant chains, same cars, same TV channels, same currency, same political system, same sides in war back to 1800s (and even that is a large portion of remembered history).
Compare it to Europe, where a 3 hour drive gives you different food, language, holidays, religion, festivals, type of beer, different political system, different history going back 1000+ years... and another 3 hour drive does it all over again.
But still, I think it’s easy to cut murricans some slack. Their country IS one of the most interesting ones. If I weren’t living in my dream country I think I’d want to live in California.
For those downvoting this comment: this conclusion (that HN's reader base is predominantly based in the SF Bay Area) should be entirely unsurprising given that HN is itself the product of Y Combinator, an accelerator based in the SF Bay Area that (last I checked, and from what I recall back when I worked for a startup that applied) specifically requires its incubatees to relocate (if they're not already there) to the SF Bay Area during said incubation.
Yes, not all of us are in the SF Bay Area, but it's pretty reasonable to assume that most readers are.
> requires its incubatees to relocate (if they're not already there) to the SF Bay Area during said incubation.
Not sure "relocate" is the best word. I've been freelancer for 8 years and one of my client is a YC startup that is and has always been in Paris, France.
If the founder (implicitly the leader or one of the top leaders) has to relocate, even for three months, then I fail to see how "relocate" is anything but the best word, especially when a company is still in a stage that would benefit from incubation.
It's a fair assumption that a lot of people on HN have SF viewpoint or views at least that partially align with them. Even those of us on the other side of the planet.
As for your downvoters: plenty of people believe they should downvote when they simply disagree. Others believe that downvoting without a comment is fine. These two groups make HN less interesting.
I actually want to know the reason why. Too many people hide behind a downvote and contribute nothing. Meanwhile they are making interesting posts disappear for no good reason. And other comments that are blatantly rubbish are not touched at all.
> It's a fair assumption that a lot of people on HN have SF viewpoint or views at least that partially align with them. Even those of us on the other side of the planet.
Totally agree with you ! But maybe some people misunderstood what you wrote.
I'd rather say that the crowd here is technically fit and policed enough to try to understand elaborate and forward-looking viewpoints, sometimes contrary to the doxa [0]. That makes comment so enjoyable to read. And it's also reassuring, that we can agree on some things on both sides of the planet .
edit : and some people who like to think of themselves as independent thinkers and live in SF by design or accident, will not like to see their opinions qualified as "SF" opinions. Works equally well for any part of the world.
> As for your downvoters
+1. This mechanism is a rather raw moderation system, people will abuse it to disqualify competing stances. There are options to refine it.
I was visiting a nature reserve where the trail opened to a resting area with some seats. A tree had a woodcut QR code on it, so I thought I'd scan it to find out more about the area.
Turns out, the QR code linked to some tracking site with a short URL. Even worse, the short URL had since been deleted, so I have no way to know the original URL it went to.
If it decides, by some arbitrary measurement, as defined by some logic within its black box firmware, that it should stop returning all blocks, then it will do so, and you have almost no recourse.
This is a very common failure mode of SSDs. As a consequence of some failed blocks (likely exceeding a number of failed blocks, or perhaps the controller’s own storage failed), drives will commonly brick themselves.
Perhaps you haven’t seen it happen, or your SSD doesn’t do this, or perhaps certain models or firmwares don’t, but some certainly do, both from my own experience, and countless accounts I’ve read elsewhere, so this is more common than you might realise.