Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by znpy 2270 days ago
Funny story: almost three years ago I got a second hand thinkPad T440. It came with a 240GB ssd. A second hand laptop with an used ssd inside.

At the time I didn't have much money so I just kept the drive and decide to possibly face the issue.

I still use it, of course (it's my personal laptop).

Some days ago I switched to root and noticed a dead.letter file in root's home directory.

I examined the file and it was an email dropped into the home directory by smartd, alerting me that my hard drive was near failure.

The funny thing is, that email was from February 2018. More than two years since that email, that drive is still working.

2 comments

Well, well, I guess we are a movement then. I got a secondhand T440p three years ago, with a 240GB SSD. This machine is indestructible - it had already seen heavy use in an engineering company, and I really haven't spared it either. Running various permutations of Arch and Xfce all the way through. Last month, I finally did upgrade the SSD to a brand new Samsung EVO 1TB. The old unit (also a Samsung EVO, as it turned out) is doing just fine, though, but now running in a non-critical convenience setup.

I can't really sing enough praises for this ancient ThinkPad, now also with a new very cheap, ridiculously superb display and stuffed full of RAM. I have a newer, sleeker, faster Lenovo Something sitting around, but somehow the 440 is what I always end up using.

What is the resolution of the display?
1920x1080, high as the T440p will go. At around USD 70 on eBay, I am blown backwards by the quality.
In my experience, SMART alerts you "that drive you can't access is probably failed"; rarely do you get an actual early warning.