Related to Atwood's post about SSD failures (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2505700), thought it would be interesting to gage HN users on their experiences. Please only participate if you actually have/had a SSD for at least 3 months. If 'Yes' leave a comment about drive details and time till failure.
Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#2No: I've had my Intel X-25M for over 2 years and its holding up great.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#3Yes, due to firmware bugs.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#4On my 3rd X25-M. First was a g1 that ceased to be recognized by the OS as a device after 9months, the second was a g2 that had much degraded performance and then started showing many errors, corrupt data and the like so I stopped using it. Just prior it was in a RAID 0 array for a year with another x25m g2 that I pulled apart after degraded perf and had a feeling something like this would happen.I now have a single x25m g2 (the other one from the array) with the OS X trim patch installed.
Waiting for a MBP update to ship with lion and dual sata rev 3 (currently its only one rev 2 and one rev 3) so I can RAID 0 two SF2500 based SSDs like the vertex 3 pro.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#5I'm using a RAID0 of two Intel 160 GB multi-level cells. One I bought in the middle of 2009, one at the end of 2009.
Both are under constant use (that raid is the only drive in my development machine) and they run fine so far.
At home I'm running two 256GB multi-level SSDs also from Intel, also in a RAID0. I bought them last December after having one Corsair SSD in a previous RAID0 attempt constantly losing some data (the other one was fine).
3 other people in the office are running SSDs (also 160GB Intel) since the end of 2009. OSes include MacOS X, Ubuntu and Windows XP and now 7.
All work fine so far and I'm not seeing any of the often quoted reliability issues (aside of that one that was defective from day 0 which happens with hard drives too)
And before you ask about the safety of using a RAID0: No I don't have backups but also, no, I don't need backups as all the important files are in git and all of my profile is on Dropbox.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#6No: I've had my Intel X-25M for over 2 years and its holding up great.
I've had the same drive for almost 2 years, and I have no problems. I have a separate spinning rust drive which I use for my swapfile and for downloads, and of course all my large files are on my fileserver.
I also have had an OCZ Agility 2 in my laptop for about a year now, and that drive hosts a (small) swapfile. No problems.
Both these systems run Linux.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#7Also had no problems whatsoever with my Intel X-25M, over 1.5 years old now. I've heard a lot of horror stories about other manufacturers, but never met another Intel user who had problems. Supposedly OCZ has gotten much better quality wise, though there are lots of bad reviews for those drives on newegg.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#8Two X25-Ms over the past two years and neither have failed. But I've been very conservative about which drive I chose due to the possibility. At the moment, Intel makes the only drives with a track record of reliability.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#9No: I've had my Intel X-25M for over 2 years and its holding up great.
No: I've had my OWC Mercury Extreme Pro for 8 months now and haven't had a single issue.
Re: Poll: Have you had a SSD fail?
#10Yes, due to firmware bugs.
I've had an OCZ Vertex for a couple of years now (I got it a few months after they came out), and it's been fantastic ever since. I've also got two Intel 60GB SSDs in RAID0 in my laptop, which have worked flawlessly since day 1.
However, I purchased an OCZ Vertex 2 for my parents a few months ago as they were building a new computer. About 2 months went by, then one day -- boom -- computer won't boot anymore. I go over and investigate, and it ultimately turns out there's a bug in the latest (read: shipping) firmware in the Vertex 2 which is tripped by some S3 power state transition (e.g. when the computer goes into hibernate mode) and causes the driver controller itself to stop responding. So, your data is OK, but there's no way to flash the drive or anything because the BIOS won't even recognize the drive anymore.
So, my advice is -- get an SSD (or two, in RAID0, if you can afford it), but make sure to keep any really important files backed up (you should be doing this anyway); also, make sure to update your firmware regularly, since the firmware itself may contain bugs that could wreck your drive.