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Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

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Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

#11

Post by mrb »

HaloZero wrote: post #8

The short summary is that nobody had used SSDs in any large scale for more than 2 years and the rates of failure for SSDs in that period of time is similar to regular hard drives. Also apparently OCZ SSDs aren't as good as Intel SSDs (based on customer return rates).

I get annoyed when people make generic claims that SSDs from vendor X are not as reliable as vendor Y.

The truth is that each vendor manufactures multiple lines of SSDs, each running different major firmware versions, with different hardware revisions. So reliability variance between models from a single vendor is often much more significant that variance between different vendors.

In your experience with OCZ, which model do you have experience with? Vertex 2? 3? Agility? Enterprise-class Talos? What about the Intel ones? Were they 50nm NAND-based SSDs? 34nm? You need to share some of these details. Claiming that Intel > OCZ is devoid of significance.

Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

#13

Post by cpswan »

bengl3rt wrote: post #4

At the moment, the reliability problem with SSDs stems entirely from firmware bugs, rather than the underlying flash technology. All the issues you hear about with regards to drives causing blue screens or simply failing to be recognized by the system at all after a while are issues with the firmware on the controller chip - the actual flash chips themselves are pretty dumb and rarely fail catastrophically. This will…

Indeed. Perhaps I have been unlucky, but of 5 SSDs that I've ever touched 2 have had catastrophic controller failures.

Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

#16

Post by abduhl »

dlsspy wrote: post #14

I wish people would compare these with IO operations instead of wall time. SSD is a huge win there, and that matters the most for a lot of people.

This is the main conclusion at the end of the article: that SSDs should be picked for their performance rather than for their reliability, as SSD reliability hasn't been proven to be better whereas performance has. Reliability comes in here because you can replace 4+ HDDs with a single SSD and thus reduce energy/heating costs and also increase reliability as you only have 1 drive that can fail vs 4+.

Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

#17

Post by jrockway »

I don't know how the data works out for this, but I imagine that SSDs in laptops fail a lot less often than spinners do. "Enterprise use" is the perfect place for rotating storage: the machines aren't dropped off desks, they aren't power-cycled very often, and they aren't stuffed into backpacks while turned on (nearly causing a fire). SSDs don't care much about these things, while spinning disks do. So I imagine that if you have an SSD in your laptop, you are less likely to experience drive failure.

(Another nice thing: those new micro-SATA SSDs are small enough that you can conceivably RAID-1 them in a tiny laptop!)

Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

#18

Post by Artagra »

AngryParsley wrote: post #2

One thing the article didn't address is performance over time. Even with TRIM support, SSDs get slower as they're used. Occasionally, cells die prematurely causing spare capacity to decrease. This won't affect read speeds much but it will hurt writes. These older SSDs will still be faster than hard drives but they won't be as fast as you'd expect them to be. Now for some of my own data. Here's an Intel X25-M G2 after…

I agree completely that, even with TRIM, the benchmarked performance of an SSD decreases over time. However, one thing to remember is that the real-world performance remains very similar, and that the average person won't be able to tell the difference. I recently had two identical Macbook Pro's next to each other, one with a Intel X25-M G1 drive in it that had been used for nearly 18 months, and the second with a fresh out the box X25-M G2. Even taking into account the fact that the G2 was factory fresh, and the G1 (a drive that does not support TRIM) was significantly slower benchmark wise, the experience of using the two machines was almost identical. There were differences, but they were very slight. I doubt I could have reliably picked which was which in a double blind test.

So for desktop use, I wouldn't worry about the performance over time of a good SSD.

Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

#19

Post by biot »

mrb wrote: post #11
HaloZero wrote: post #8

The short summary is that nobody had used SSDs in any large scale for more than 2 years and the rates of failure for SSDs in that period of time is similar to regular hard drives. Also apparently OCZ SSDs aren't as good as Intel SSDs (based on customer return rates).

I get annoyed when people make generic claims that SSDs from vendor X are not as reliable as vendor Y. The truth is that each vendor manufactures multiple lines of SSDs, each running different major firmware versions, with different hardware revisions. So reliability variance between models from a single vendor is often much more significant that variance between different vendors. In your experience with OCZ, which…

The article makes those claims, based mostly on anecdotal evidence rather than a peer-reviewed scientifically rigorous study. It concludes with: "Giving credit where it is due, many of the IT managers we interviewed reiterated that Intel's SLC-based SSDs are the shining standard by which others are measured."

While an itemized breakdown by datacenter isn't available one datacenter (InterServer.net, with fewer than 100 SSDs) says: "Intel SSD's are night and day in failure rates when it comes to some other drives. For example the SuperTalent SSD drives have had an extremely high failure rate including model FTM32GL25H, FTM32G225H, and FTM32GX25H. I estimate about two-thirds of these drives have failed since being put into service. With these failures however, the drives were not recoverable at all. They generally disappeared completely, no longer being readable. Spinners die much more gracefully with an easier disk recovery. I cannot compare this to the Intel's SSDs yet since I have not experienced any failures.". They apparently use Intel's X25-E (SSDSA2SH032G1GN).

Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

#20

Post by viraptor »

mrb wrote: post #12

Why is the IT industry so cautious about SSD reliability? We have spent decades developing HDD fault-tolerance mechanisms or processes such as RAID and backups. We should trust them .

We're currently trusting a drive that might fail in 5 or so years in one specific place. The rest is recoverable, the place of failure might be overwritten anyways, the data might not be needed, smart will warn you that the problem is close in many cases...

With SSD you have a chance of going completely blank. If it happens to be a firmware issue on a RAID mirror, there's also a chance of common fault in both drives. Even if you have backups in that case, do you really want to deal with such situation?

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