Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler - NVMe M2 drive failures

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support | NVMe M2 drive failures

DVA5857
Captain, B767-300

Joined on April 23 2008
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary
Stage 1 Jet Century Club
Quincentenary Club
Online Quintuple Century Club

Northeastern United States

515 legs, 1,054.0 hours
502 legs, 1,022.2 hours online
513 legs, 1,050.8 hours ACARS
15 legs, 33.0 hours event

Posted onPost created on November 17 2019 22:35 ET by Chuck Angle

I recently purchased a new computer system: ASUS Maxuims XI with 32 GB ram. I-9 CPU, a ASUS 2080 GPU, a 2TB WD hard drive, one 250 NVMe M2 and one 1 GB NVMe m2 card. Every thing works well until I install either XPlane 11 or P3Dv4 on the either of the M2 cards. The programs will run twice the freeze up then not open when I click on the icon and finally .......... the M2 doesn't exist anymore on windows explore nor in the Bios! Its back at MicroCenter now but they aren't sure what the issue is.

Chuck Angle

Captain, B767-300

DVA3680
First Officer, B767-300
OLP

Joined on November 01 2006
Stock Car Racing Club
Century Club

Berthoud, CO

114 legs, 232.4 hours
97 legs, 212.8 hours online
106 legs, 215.1 hours ACARS
2 legs, 3.7 hours event

Posted onPost created on November 18 2019 00:05 ET by Kevin Williams

yeah that's weird. I kinda wonder if it's a board issue? Hopefully they fix it!

Kevin Williams

First Officer, B767-300

DVA043
Senior Captain, MD-11
OLP

Joined on June 10 2001
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"Col. Panic"
Marietta, GA

2,306 legs, 9,290.0 hours
240 legs, 553.9 hours online
1,964 legs, 8,083.1 hours ACARS
75 legs, 196.3 hours event
2,342 legs, 9,424.9 hours total
91 legs dispatched, 66.4 hours

Posted onPost created on November 18 2019 17:09 ET by Luke Kolin

If the drive becomes invisible in Windows I'd RMA the drive and ask for a replacement.

Cheers!

Luke Kolin

Senior Captain, MD-11

DVA10851
Captain, A320

Joined on June 15 2010
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary
Toulouse 250 Club
Quincentenary Club

New Haven, CT

510 legs, 2,120.8 hours
2 legs, 3.2 hours online
508 legs, 2,113.7 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on November 18 2019 23:17 ET by Jose Bazil

I ran into similar problem i had to update the bios and new firmware and drivers. If all else fails then board issue.

Jose Bazil

Captain, A320

Posted onPost created on November 28 2019 19:52 ET by Chuck Angle

Well so far the "mystery is solved. The mother board was faulty, microcenter replaced the board and the M2 drives so far so good. Now reinstalling everything.

Chuck Angle

Captain, B767-300

DVA13585
Captain, B777-200

Joined on December 26 2018
DVA Five-Year Anniversary
Century Club

Western Europe

126 legs, 407.2 hours
125 legs, 404.5 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on December 18 2019 00:28 ET by Oliver Kleber

I am currently buillding a pretty similar rig. Do you boot from either of the M2 drives and if yes did you change to UEFI in BIOS ?

Oliver

Oliver Kleber

Captain, B777-200

Posted onPost created on December 25 2019 03:06 ET by Chuck Angle

I boot from my WD conventional hard drive. I worry about the limited number of read/writes I haven’t had any issues since having a new mother board installed

Chuck Angle

Captain, B767-300

DVA13420
Assistant Chief Pilot, B737-800

Joined on February 25 2018
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Everett 500 Club

Springfield, MO

1,081 legs, 1,880.1 hours
1,080 legs, 1,878.0 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on December 25 2019 13:50 ET by Adam Magiera

Chuck Angle wrote:

... I worry about the limited number of read/writes ...

On modern SSD and nVME drives, the number of writes is so high it would take some work to burn through them in a few years. I have been running my OS off of SSD's and nVME drives for years now and have never encountered a drive running out of writes. I have a drive in one of my old computers that I ran the OS on for 6 years and it still has about 40% of the expected life left.

Adam Magiera

Assistant Chief Pilot, B737-800

DVA13608
Captain, A320

Joined on January 26 2019
Moose Club
Century Club
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Edmonton, AB Canada

143 legs, 242.3 hours
140 legs, 235.1 hours online
140 legs, 238.3 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on December 31 2019 13:16 ET by Gerard Beekmans

You are correct in at least thinking about SSD endurance. Keep in mind this has only to do with the *write* endurance of an SSD. They are indeed finite. You can read as much as you want. It's only during writing that things start to wear out.

The typical way this is expressed is called "drive writes per day" (DWPD). This is the average number of times you can write the entire SSD drive's size on a daily basis within the given warranty period and it will be guaranteed to work (or money back if you have a good vendor). There is a huge difference in how much you can write to a drive.

On one far end of the spectrum in "Enterprise world" you can write a drive's size multiple times a day for 5 years and be okay. On the consumer end it's a much smaller fraction.

Two examples to illustrate in more concrete terms.

Looking at a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe, 1 TB. Its rated DWPD is 0.3. This means I can write 0.3 x 1 TB = 307 GB a day, every day, during its warranty period. That is a total bytes written worth 547 TB if we assume a 5 year warranty. Samsung rounds it up and will guarantee a 600 TB write endurance.

A Samsung 970 PRO doubles this to give a total of just over 1 PB (petabyte).

It comes down to how much do you write to the drive.

I have one of these Samsung 1 GB Pro NVMe ones. I've had this one for 12 months now. It's my main drive so it runs my OS, all my applications and all flight sim stuff. I have written 5 TB so far. I have a yearly "allotment" of 200 TB.

So even if I reach the end of the warranty period it's very likely this drive will run for many many more years to come. It's just no longer guaranteed after that warranty time frame but I should still be able to reach the 1200 TB in the Pro's case however at my current usage that will take me 300 (three hundred) more years. I'll have it replaced well before that lol.

Gerard Beekmans

Captain, A320

Posted onPost created on December 31 2019 13:32 ET by Luke Kolin

Thanks Gerard for doing the math for us. Any modern SSD will have more lifespan than any of us.

Cheers!

Luke Kolin

Senior Captain, MD-11

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