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There was a nice SATA SSD on sale today, but I didn't get it because it came with no Power Loss Prevention (PLP) guarantee. The same vendor used to make a similar SATA SSD drive that did offer PLP, but that drive is no longer available at a price I'm willing to pay.

At work, I think I've used an SSD that doesn't have PLP and survived a few power outages over the last six years, but it may be the newer "stick kind" (NVMe) that plugs directly into the motherboard.

I had lengthy discussions with Grok, Gemini and MS Copilot about how SATA SSDs without PLP can potentially brick if power is lost during intensive write operations.

I think some AI agents seem to imply that it could cost me $1000 or more to recover most of the data on a bricked SSD drive while recovering most of the data for a bricked mechanical HD is only maybe $400. Also, mechanical drives pretty much never brick due to a power loss. Lastly, I think one AI agent told me that all modern Macs have a "form" of PLP with their integrated SSD setups, but I'm currently using Windows 11 (No TPM - LOL) and Debian 12 on custom hardware.

I don't want to buy a UPS for my entire workstation and monitor because if I'm rendering video in the middle of the night while I'm asleep, I'm not sure 10 minutes is long enough for me to hear the obnoxious beeping, wake up, and turn my computer off. I also don't trust a consumer UPS enough to automatically shutdown my "deviant" (potentially virus laden) operating systems in time.

For reasons I won't get into here, I feel SSDs might be safer for me if I could guarantee they won't brick due to power outages that seem to happen to me twice a year while my computer is on.

Do I really need PLP?

Is there some sort of external HD enclosure or NFS I can power via consumer UPS to avoid corruption of consumer grade SATA SSDs? Could I emulate a cheap NFS that will run on a consumer UPS for several hours using a Rasberry Pi and four SATA SSDs (presuming SATA connectors were available)?

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    Why don't you just get a UPS? That way you don't have to worry. Commented 2 days ago
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    Even with PLP you are not guaranteed that cannot happen. If you have data worth $1000 then you need to invest it the hardware and infrastructure to handle a power outage responsible and gracefully. I can tell this conversation isn't worth having so I am going to just slowly walk away from it. Commented 2 days ago
  • some AI agents seem to imply that it could cost me $1000 or more to recover most of the data on a bricked SSD drive while recovering most of the data for a bricked mechanical HD is only maybe $400. Could "AI" not recover the "data"? Your research may have gaps. Commented yesterday
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    @Ramhound If you have data worth anything (not even $1000), you need to invest in good backups first. There are many ways that can make you lose data (most frequently user error, but also SW bugs, ransomware attacks, and all of those are far more likely than power outages bricking SSDs), and UPSes cover just a small subset of that. Storage is so cheap these days that decent, daily or hourly off-site backups can be set up easily and cost just a few €/$/£ per month (unless we're talking about tens of TB of really precious data). Commented yesterday
  • My HDD brick from power outage. Commented 10 hours ago

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At work, I think I've used an SSD that doesn't have PLP and survived a few power outages over the last six years, but it may be the newer "stick kind" (NVMe) that plugs directly into the motherboard.

"Survival of the medium" has nothing to do with PLP. You can basically expect any SSD to survive a loss of power.

PLP guarantees that everything sent to SSD at a point of power loss will actually be written to persistent storage.

That's relevant if it really matters to you that the data that had been sent to the disk at the very time of power loss has been actually written to disk (and not just on-disk volatile cache). It doesn't solve the problem that you might be running a normal computer, with a normal workload on a normal operating system, meaning that there's in-RAM write caches that haven't even been sent to disk at the point of power failure, and potentially a lot more of that than there's on-disk cache.

It does make a difference when you're using these disks for a database system that makes strong guarantees on consistency if, and only if, having sent data to the SSD means that it's actually been written to storage.

If you're not a database engineer understanding and worrying about these kind of consistency guarantees, than PLP is a pure waste of money and performance.

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    Thank you for this help, but I'm not sure what to think of this: superuser.com/questions/1845946/…. Two models I was considering are rumored to have high failure rates. One model supposedly died just from a contractor flipping a circuit breaker. Another model I was considering has PLP but is still apparently flaky even with the integrated Power Loss Prevention. Commented 2 days ago
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    as I literally said in the first sentence of my answer. "Survival of the medium" has nothing to do with PLP. Commented yesterday
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    IIRC in some older SSDs it was possible for the flash translation layer (FTL) to become corrupted on power loss and effectively kill the whole drive. But they're typically journalled now (and have been for a very long time) so it's not really a concern anymore. Commented yesterday
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    More to the point, as per an Intel/Solidigm employee, the DRAM cache on SSDs exists to cache the FTL mapping tables, not to cache user data. So in any case you should not be at risk of any 'written' data being lost. Commented yesterday

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