RE: HDD whining

[Drew Weaver via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

Hi,

Barring everything everyone else has said about availability/cost/suitability,

You either do already (or you had better configure it so that you do in the future) get warnings from your RAID 
controller(s) when the remaining durability on an SSD falls below a threshold.

I think in Dell it's 5%. So it's not like they fail silently and you're just stuck. 

Whereas HDDs (aside from some hours based predictive failure mechanisms in certain drives) do just fail silently all of 
the time.

I'm not going to look up the stats right now but I'm pretty sure that the overall failure rate for comparable SSDs [not 
talking about Samsung 990 pro M.2 drives] (outside of the aforementioned eventual reduction of durability to zero) is 
much lower than HDDs.

Thanks,
-Drew




-----Original Message-----
From: Nigel Titley via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> 
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2026 11:56 AM
To: nanog () lists nanog org
Cc: Nigel Titley <nigel () titley com>
Subject: Re: HDD whining



On 9/25/26 21:54, Shane Ronan via NANOG wrote:
> Do we even want to know why you are insisting on HDD's?
Randy has already mentioned the difficulty in getting 20TB SSDs, but there are other good reasons for not, for example, 
using SSDs in a RAID array... like, unlike HDDs, they tend to all fail at once. I don't know if he's using them with 
MD5 RAID but that's another good reason for continuing to use spinning rust.

Nigel
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