Gunnar Wolf• File recovery in process...
Gunnar Wolf
Nice grey life
Search
Search this site:
Navigation
Home / blog
Categories
About me
File recovery in process...
2026.08.13
Previous •<br>Next
Ohai,
I have some pending, encrypted mails to answer. And some of my answers for<br>the next few days (particularly to what pertains to the current<br>in-discussion vote on LLM usage in<br>Debian) will be unsigned, even<br>though I’d like otherwise.
My desktop system at work is showing some data corruption, and I’m slowly<br>backing up my data. Fortunately, it seems I haven’t lost any data, but<br>still, given I’m letting rsync run until it starts spewing I/O errors,<br>then power down and let the machine cool a bit, and start again… it is a<br>potentially long process.
And yes, this makes me somewhat angry. Why angry? Because I’m working on a<br>brand-new computer (well, have used it for slightly over six months),<br>custom-built to specs requested by my workplace. Specs that I don’t really<br>need, this machine is an utter luxury (i.e. an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor<br>with 16 real cores / 32 threads; 128GB RAM in this day and age of RAM<br>shortage, quite recent 32GB GPU, and lots of shiny lights seen in its huge<br>fishbowl cabinet, liquid-based cooling…). The specs came not from me, but<br>from people who had no idea what we would use them for. And yes, I expect<br>the little fortune spent on this machine to be good for my use for probably<br>a decade, as my previous computer was, but the amount paid<br>was… exorbitant.
But still, what I learned recently is that the 4TB nVME SSD it has (a<br>T-Force TM8FFJX34T) is… a very cheap brand, bought because it was close<br>to half the price of other offerings similar in capacity. According to<br>smartctl’s output, th SSD operates with a Warning Comp. Temp. Threshold:<br>90 Celsius and Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold: 110 Celsius, which sounds<br>sensible, even too high for my standards (my last two laptops have been<br>fanless… yes, an ARM system is very different from a high-end gaming<br>machine). I’m right now typing from my laptop, which shows 78°C and 82°C<br>for warning/critical thresholds.
And as expected, under heavy sustained reads (backing up to my NFS server),<br>the desktop’s smartctl shows Temperature: 83 Celsius and, further down,<br>Temperature Sensor 1: 107 Celsius and Temperature Sensor 2: 82 Celsius<br>(don’t know which of these would make the threshold jump). The SSD has<br>sustained Media and Data Integrity Errors: 20 and Warning<br>Comp. Temperature Time: 21 (although Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0). At least one of my colleagues have shrugged and installed a SATA SSD,<br>laying the huge nVME basically to waste.
Anyway… I also learned I am not the first, but the fourth person to<br>notice this kind of issues in this system (out of ten similar purchased<br>systems AIUI). It is completely unacceptable, and I’ll be pushing our<br>Institute’s authorities to demand the provider to provide either good<br>component quality for this very expensive system that has many luxury<br>items, or to fix the system’s build in a way the nVME does not heat as much<br>as it currently does.
Anyway, sigh, I only wanted to say, please excuse me for not using my<br>cryptographic keys for a couple of days 🙃
PS- I’m also currently not connected to IRC and Jabber (and some similar<br>technologies), as my bouncer runs from my usual workstation.
Categories
Hardware
Life
Comments
Got any comments to add? Send them by e-mail to gwolf.blog at gwolf dot<br>org, I will relay them over here (and answer, if pertinent).