Topic: HP has got to face an avalanche of lawsuits over this "glitch"

[Libertas]

https://hackaday.com/2019/12/10/patch-or-your-solid-state-drives-roll-over-and-die/

How about an eye patch?  Arrrrr!

[Alphabet Soup]

Businesses on the "gold plan" (top tier contracts) won't care because HP will eat any failed drives - no questions asked. It's consumers and small business (you know - the ones with the least amount of clout) who will take it in the shorts.

I saw this with Dell. My idiot boss (being generous here) needed to develop and implement a plan for the next wave of computer purchases. I had been through the process four times previously and had the bones to get er done. He came from a project management background (insurance industry) and no technical experience. Do you think he allowed me anywhere near the process?

So, as a direct repudiation of me, he made the decision to purchase a consumer-grade Dell laptop (instead of business-class). The model he chose looked pretty but performed awfully. They had a > 30% failure rate and were directly responsible for three fires.

I took great delight in reminding him of his abject incompetence.

Maybe that's why I got no Christmas card from him?!

LoL

[Pandora]

This is all greek to me.  All I want to know is if/when my HP laptop is gonna brick.  Can either of you wizards tell me that, please?

[Pablo de Fleurs]

This is all greek to me.  All I want to know is if/when my HP laptop is gonna brick.  Can either of you wizards tell me that, please?

Average life-span is 5-6 years - back-up & prepare accordingly - cloud storage is relatively cheap.

[ToddF]

I back up everything.  I just bought a Seagate 8TB external for $119.  There's no excuse not to have EVERYTHING doubled up.

[Libertas]

I'm with Todd, I also have a Seagate external, I keep all data on it, nothing on my older model Samsung or Toshiba laptops but software.  When not being used the drive goes into a little fire-safe. 

I keep wanting to end dependence on Microsquish or crApple OS's...would like to get a pre-load Ubuntu (Linnux) laptop...not sure if any of the offerings jump out ahead of the others...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebooks/new-xps-13-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-7390-laptop/cax13w10p1c606csu?view=configurations&configurationid=51a9dd9b-698b-49a9-b4b8-e5b3fc9b3e85

https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-13/

https://system76.com/laptops/oryp5/c

The Dell is more affordable but may not be better...and better to me is reliable and durable.  I kinda like the System76 Oryx Pro but I know nothing about the latter two outfits...or what else I may need on it to do what I want (simple stuff...web surfing, spreadsheets, photo album stuff...the usual).

[WilliamVA]

I back up everything.  I just bought a Seagate 8TB external for $119.  There's no excuse not to have EVERYTHING doubled up.

Currently I am running a 2TB Seagate external, think I paid around 59 dollars for it.   I do not connect it to my pc. or laptop.
I run it off my router, which makes it available to both devices. 

As far as HP SSD's, the good news it that issues are Firmware related (bios).   Hp released the an initial firmware patch early
this month, for certain models, and a second firmware patch was released this week.   If an individual or company purchased
HP SSD's and neglected to register the device, then they will not receive notification of the patches.   Which is a good reminder
to register the equipment you buy.   

[AlanS]

Why does a hard drive give a shyt about uptime?

[Alphabet Soup]

Why does a hard drive give a shyt about uptime?

Friction is the enemy of most mechanical devices and HDD's (hard disc drives) are no exception. I had a machine that served as a domain controller for my home network. It ran (on already used hardware) for four years without being shut down. When I finally had to move it I (reluctantly) shut down the machine and moved it to its new location. When I went to start it up again the hard drive would not spin up - the platter was stuck tight.

It did not matter sine I have a snapshot of it (backup) and did not keep any data on the machine.

Uptime on an SSD (solid State Drive) is measured differently. There are no moving parts in an SSD drive. But, unlike a conventional HDD, the lifespan of an SSD can be measured in the number of "writes" it makes to its storage. If the drive is used for storage and doesn't see much day to day activity it will last far longer than a drive that is constantly under load.

[patentlymn]

I worked at a place that used small flash memory (SSD) to store some configuration data for some control system console.This was 20 years ago.  It had a limited lifetime but was wearing out too quickly. It turned out that a checksum was being updated in the same place each time a change was made. Solution was to vary the location of the checksum write randomly.

Also, in server farms there are so many hard drives that the failures are daily if not hourly on average. Supervisory/leader  nodes are a single point of failure so every node can be be a supervisor. If a node goes missing the other nodes detect it and vote in a new supervisor, but only one, not zero or two. In the middle of your amazon order a hard drive may fail and you do not notice it.

People won the Turing prize for these genius level paranoid algorithms. When one node nominates itself for leader what if others do as well? What if the nodes in the voting process die during the voting process?

https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/laureate/leslie-lamport.html

[Alphabet Soup]

20 years ago I was working at Microsoft. Among other jobs (good and bad) I got to participate in a project called the "Terabyte Array". It was basically 100 Compaq Proliant servers, each with 10 1gig hard drives chained together (each pretty much the industry standard for the era) to harness a terabyte of disc storage. I don't know if it was the first time they had unified control of a terabyte of data but it sure was the first I had ever heard of such a thing. We had it set up in the lobby of the Executive Meeting Center and was a big f'ing deal at the time for MS.

I now own several 3-terabyte drives that can fit in my back pocket...

Altard-proofed (got my math straight)

[Libertas]

Well...not helping to calm my concern about the rise of SkyNet...especially pat's blurb - Supervisory/leader  nodes are a single point of failure so every node can be be a supervisor. If a node goes missing the other nodes detect it and vote in a new supervisor, but only one, not zero or two. In the middle of your amazon order a hard drive may fail and you do not notice it.

Why does it sound to me like the uprising could be easier than I already thought possible?