Time to really finish this story:

the SSD will be subject to a nice 4 kV burn-in test

That was spectacularly unspectacular. A few sparks from the 4 kV probe, but no burn marks, no fire, no exploding parts. Our 4 kV supply is just way too limited. It can deliver just a few mA. The next misbehaving SSD will just see plain mains voltage. 230 V with a slow-blow 16 A fuse.

I decided to order another fake RAID controller, using a relatively cheap SATA controller, but from a manufacturer with a good reputation and a lot of RAID experience.

That fake RAID controller is really a nice piece of hard- and software. But it is not completely free of problems. It still had trouble when running more than one VirtualBox VMs at the same time in the factory default configuration, both on my work machine and on my home machine. So I finally called tech support. The manufacturer insists on phone calls, which is a little bit odd, but it took just one phone call to get rid of my problem. The supporter told me, no, that should not happen, not with my machines, and not with any other. I was using the newest firmware and drivers available, and so I was told to try disabling Native Command Queuing for all SSDs right in the controller's BIOS. The drivers will respect that setting. I also disabled sleep mode, just to be sure. Disabling NCQ costs a little bit of performance, but both machines now work fine. I don't care if disk performance goes down by a few percents, the SSDs are sufficiently fast even without NCQ. If the onboard SATA fake RAID had a way to disable NCQ, I would try to go back to the onboard RAID. It is there, it has power, it has a sufficient number of SATA ports, and it does not need a PCIe slot.

A little detail: The RAID software does write a log file, to aid debugging. But that does not help if the log file is written to the RAID volume that has problems and needs to be debugged. The supporter proposed the obvious solution: Add a USB flash drive and have the RAID software log to that drive instead. I don't do that, my problem is solved.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

In reply to Re^3: [OT] Reminder: SSDs die silently by afoken
in thread [OT] Reminder: SSDs die silently by afoken

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