What Happened?
My Synology complained a few months back that it’s SSD cache (2x NVMe 1TB drives) had used up it’s theoretical write limits. I forget the exact total write limit, but it’s up there and according to whatever metric it was using, they have written 100% of the amount it can write before the drive will start to degrade. I figured this would eventually happen as SSDs do have a finite write limit. But that is all calculated and can be effected by quality of manufacture and the underlying technology used to store the data.
What To Do Now?
I appreciate this as anyone who would run anything needing perfectly working machines all the time would, but now I needed to fix this. First I needed to remove them from the unit. Otherwise it would continue to remind me that this happened. It took me about 2 months before I finally removed them. I did pretty quickly remove them from use so my array was never in trouble. But clicking a few buttons in a web interface is not the same as scheduling downtime, unplugging it, and putting a screwdriver to it. Joke was on me, I didn’t need a screwdriver for a DS1522+.
Now I have two NVMe SSDs just sitting on my desk and now I need to make a decision. Do I toss them (you know, like you’re supposed to do with bad hardware) because some cells may start to fail.. OR… Do I put them in light duty machines that will likely last a long time before anything bad happens?
Takeaway
While I would not recommend this for the kids at home, buying a new SSD may not be in the cards. As it is, I didn’t replace them and more or less my Synology have been working fine. So why toss out something with even a little bit of life in it? It’s why I have a few laptops on Gen 6 Intel chips.
Possible uses are anything that you don’t care that much about and is light duty with writing to the disk. Give it some thought, you might have a project machine you could use it in for testing.
What Did I Do?
Well, I grabbed one and put it into a 10th Gen Core i5 laptop I was given and of course it worked. I don’t plan to use this laptop for much, even less than my regular laptop, so it should be ideal. And this laptop has a much brighter screen than my other long battery life laptop that I would bring to places where I won’t expect to do much. Will the battery hold up, TBD. But I am only attracted to this machine due to it’s bright screen first and potential for battery life out living my more beefier laptop.
