FC11 - Health problems for my SSD drive?

[Stewart Williams]

Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> Again FC11 newly installed on an ASUS ee 701 that has a 4Gb SSD drive. 
> Since that is NOT enough space, I have a 8Gb SD card in the slot and the
> / and /boot partitions is on the SD card.  Swap drive and /home are on
> the SSD card.
> 
> Anyway, I just got a drive health warning.  Opening the Icon I get it
> telling me about potential problems with the SSD drive.  It 'passed' the
> assessment, but in the details some attributes exceeded the thresholds.
> 
> 
> Now before I dive into this, I am wondering if SMART can tell this is an
> SSD drive and some things WILL be different???
> 
> 

I recently had F10 and Mandriva 2009.1 installed and running fine on my
eee 900 using the removable 16GB SSD as my /home and swap partitions.

I decided to upgrade to F11 and anaconda produced errors during writing
the partition layout and/or formatting them. I tried many times and it
just kept aborting the install with different errors.

I suspected a problem with one of the drives, so with the Live USB
install loaded, I ran `dmesg` in a terminal and discovered lots of
kernel errors writing to /dev/sdb (the 16GB SSD).

...

Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 1

...

I tried writing files, fdisking, etc. the drive and it just produced
more of the above I/O errors, and it seemed extremely so when working on
the drive.

I was convinced the drive was faulty and was ready to send it to asus
for a warranty repair.

Before doing this, I restore the factory Xandros image and also thought
I'd zero the drive out to clear any of my data off first.

I ran:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1K

After a while it completed without error. (I didn't take note of how
long it took)

I ran `dmesg` again to see if there were masses of errors, but there
were none.

I rebooted and thought I'd try partitioning it again as there were no
errors and to my absolute amazement. I managed to partition, create a
filesystem, mount and write data to the drive with no I/O errors and it
was fast again. Using it for over a week it's still running 100% and F11
even installed first time.

Weird or what?

I know with normal hard disks I/O errors indicate a dying drive, but not
 having much experience with SSD drives, are they that different. Is it
possible the drive is OK now??? it certainly seems it.

BTW. smartctl doesn't seem to be aware of the drive in it's database. So
that didn't help much.