SSD drives

[Gilboa Davara]

> It's a 180Gb Intel 520 Series SSD with firmware version 400i.
...
> I have an ext4 filesystem on it.

Semi-OT: A word of friendly warning:
I recently bricked a 120GB Intel 520 w/ the latest firmware (not sure
if it was 400i) w/ ext4 on Fedora 17/x86_64. (Second bricked SSD in 12
months)
A *very* short power shortage crept under my APC UPS and bricked the SSD.
Amazingly enough, the power shortage didn't crash the machine - which
continued working off the main HDD software RAID array.
Luckily for me I rather distrust SSDs (see below) and use it as fast
cache-of-sort, so I only lost a couple of hours of work.

IMHO SSDs have one huge drawback: Unlike HDDs that can be partially
recovered from more-or-less any type of damage by recovering data
around bad sectors or replacing a fried controller board, SSDs complex
write scheme and complex firmware usually means that any type of
damage / firmware error / etc usually bricks it with more or less zero
chance of getting the data back.
On the top of that, we (as in all of us) have 40+ years worth of
experience in predicting the life cycle (and death) of HDDs. There's
far less information about the life cycle of SSDs.

In short, backup. A lot.

- Gilboa