Just a note: today this piece of $&383 Samsung trash failed boot drive scrub with IO errors. It lasted all of 3 months.
For comparison, in my other server, I have 8 GB Sandisk thumb drive, bought 6 years ago for $5 on Amazon. It still works. Same TrueNAS software, same lack of writes (system dataset is on a main pool).
Rant: Samsung shall really stick to manufacturing components. They really, royally, phenomenally, suck at end user products. Due to sheer incompetence or on purpose, it does not matter. I avoided Samsung for years, because every single Samsung anything I ever owned has failed spectacularly. From external hard drives and printers to washing machines and displays. But after over half a decade I decided to give them another chance with this thumb drive, because it’s just who I am, overwhelmingly, devastatingly generous customer. And this is what I get. Goodbye Samsung forever. Thank you for attending my Ted tack. /rant.
I don’t know if you can single-out Samsung: USB flash devices are not engineered for reliability. Every USB stick I’ve booted from, many different brands, has failed. Tried in RPis. Tried in ASICs. Tried in diskless ESXi installs. Tried in TV media players. Today they’re using the crappiest flash with the lowest write endurance, and lack the management chips and overprovisioning that prolong the life of regular SATA/NVMe/etc SSDs.
But I agree older flash made in less-dense sizes fares better: which may be why your Sandisk has been lucky so far. I also have some small USB sticks from years ago that still work - but that’s because I haven’t used them as boot media.
Nah. Why would i? To waste even more time on it just to get the same crappy product? I’d rather smash it and recycle with other electronics. I did leave the Amazon review though.
Specifically because it’s Samsung. I don’t mind some no-name crap to crap out. But this one was marketed with impressive performance specs. And lived up to those specs. It’s just flash they used was garbage. They could have easily overprovidion it 2x and keep silently fixing the issues as they appear.
For RPi (and dashcams) I’ve started using kingstons industrial sd card — they seem to last forever. Not one has failed yet.
Just to be clear — boot drive on TrueNAS is pretty much readonly. Nothing is written to it, literally zero iops once the machine is booted. The only writes that go there are software update and configuration changes. Which there were none. This SSD was written ones, read once, and scrubbed monthly (also pure read workload). And it just died and lost data, while being powered all the time. There is zero excuse for this.
