tl;dr SSD failure rates are no better than most hard drives. Intel failure rates only report validated errors(returned drive fails in Intel test), real rate probably 2-3X higher. SMART doesn't work for SLC SSD (doesn't detect failures early enough to recover). Update your firmware often as failures initially were mostly bugs and not write-failures.
Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#32I remember reading early on when SSD first came out where people claimed that when SSD fails, it fails into a read-only state so at least you do not lose your data. But apparently this is not true and it's not how SSD fail, at all. What's crazy is I have not had a hard drive fail since we passed the triple digit mark for GB capacity. Last one was a 20GB drive (ah the old days).
That's what happens when the flash memory wears out, but really SSDs haven't been around long enough for anyone but the most intense users to wear out the flash memory of one. Instead the problems people have run into are in other parts of the SSD - mostly firmware.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#33Reminds me of CFLs. In theory, they are much more reliable than incandescent. Practically, they often stop working just as soon as the old light bulbs would, and they cost significantly more.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#34I remember reading early on when SSD first came out where people claimed that when SSD fails, it fails into a read-only state so at least you do not lose your data. But apparently this is not true and it's not how SSD fail, at all. What's crazy is I have not had a hard drive fail since we passed the triple digit mark for GB capacity. Last one was a 20GB drive (ah the old days).
I've had a few go bad in recent years, ranging from 160Gb to (most recently, unless you count a 320 that was on its way out according to the SMART readings and was pulled and replace before failing) a 500.
They've been from a range or manufacturers (and a range of ranges) with not enough of each to consider a pattern.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#35All these statistics come from server use, where drives are constantly spinning and kept at a relatively constant temperature. I'm curious if there's a bigger difference in laptop computers, where the drives see a lot more physical abuse, power cycles, temperature variations, etc.
I haven't quite been able to grasp why Toms Hardware, which I view largely as a consumer/enthusiast review site would choose to analyze the failure rates of SSD's in a datacenter environment. How about going to IT departments that have "floater" laptops and seeing how long the drives hold up in those? I think the primary consumer reasons for purchasing SSD's are increased battery life and physical fault tolerance in…
> I haven't quite been able to grasp why Toms Hardware, which I view largely as a consumer/enthusiast review site would choose to analyze the failure rates of SSD's in a datacenter environment.
It could just be that there is not enough good data from the consumer market to make solid conclusions from. DCs use drives in large numbers, so you are going to get "concentrated" readings.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#36All these statistics come from server use, where drives are constantly spinning and kept at a relatively constant temperature. I'm curious if there's a bigger difference in laptop computers, where the drives see a lot more physical abuse, power cycles, temperature variations, etc.
I haven't quite been able to grasp why Toms Hardware, which I view largely as a consumer/enthusiast review site would choose to analyze the failure rates of SSD's in a datacenter environment. How about going to IT departments that have "floater" laptops and seeing how long the drives hold up in those? I think the primary consumer reasons for purchasing SSD's are increased battery life and physical fault tolerance in…
considering how much randomness can clump failures and successes, a small set of consumer used stories with hardware from different vendors, or even disparate IT departments with their "floaters" will leave you with a result you can't be sure of. the first company they mention had maybe 100s of drives and hadn't had a failure yet. it was only the larger companies that had reliable data. what might be interesting is the data from apple's ipods etc.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#37Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Add to this that it likely contains the most valuable non-commodity asset: your data. Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7…
> Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Is it really? Completely anecdotally I've never lost a HDD, but keep going through power supplies… it'd be nice to see some data on component failure rates. I assume some exists, but I haven't really felt strongly enough about it to go look.
I've worked in IT for several years. My own fail rate is one or two drives per year in a 50 computer environment. So in a 150 computer environment its 3 to 6 a year. That's desktops/laptops.
In servers its a completely different game. Thanks to A/C and steady loads its much, much better. There is a chance of getting a run of bad disks and suddenly having multiple failures a year, but only on that specific model. Generally, I'd say that rate is closer to .25-.5 fails for every 50 drives per year, if that. So over 4 years I can expect one or two drive fails on 50 disks.
Regardless, drives fail all the time on desktops and laptops. The reliability is a huge, huge problem. Supposedly, SSDs were going to fix this, but their teething problems are probably making them worse than spinning disks.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#38At 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…
It would be nice to see the SSD manufacturers get a clue about recovering data. Having the device fail catastrophically is nuts; it means that all of the carefully designed recovery schemes in the file system are basically worthless.
Yuck.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#39Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Add to this that it likely contains the most valuable non-commodity asset: your data. Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7…
Never lost a hard drive (in ~ 15 laptops over 20 years). Not once.
I keep losing mechanicals (lid hinges) and other mechanicals, though.
Re: Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?
#40One 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…
Once upon a time, it was best practice to keep the swap file/partition (or log files, etc.) off of the SSD in order to keep the frequent writes from wearing out the SSD too quickly. Do you feel like this is outdated advice?