SSD Drives: Good For the Long Haul? - Comments Page 1

Very helpful information. Thanks for the article. I've been considering an SSD drive for my souped up netbook of a laptop as the traditional HDD is showing some warning signs it may soon be time for a replacement. I didn't even realize that there was a "concern" out there about durability with the SSD drives, so your article both raised the issue and dispelled the myth for me in one fell swoop. :)

You neglected to mention that there are SSD's that are designed for servers that can exceed the reading and writing specs for the consumer-grade SSD's by a wide margin. These drives also have mechanisms to insure that all cached data gets written. They cost a little more than a consumer-grade SSD, but are worth the money if you are going to be doing a lot of data writing to your SSD.

To me, the bigger question is *how* do they fail. Do they suffer the equivalent of bad sectors, meaning you gradually start to lose data integrity but can still retrieve the majority of your data, or do they suddenly die entirely? And are there any SMART metrics that give an indication of impending doom?

Thanks Bob for clearing up the confusion. I need to consider buying an external one for my laptop.

I've seen more SSD drives fail in the year my company bought them than all the magnetic drives in the 20+ years I've been working with computers (back to the Seagate ST251 40MB drives)... While the price of the SSD's are falling rapidly, and the speed is very attractive, I just don't trust them. Funny, considering they're "solid state" yet less reliable than the drives with moving parts. I'll wait for the reliability and longevity to improve.

Bob, I've had two SSDs fail on me within their first year of use. Let me explain.

Neither actually failed: their onboard diagnostics warned me of imminent failure and I was able to have the first one replaced under warranty, on the spot (the company was local to me) and with no data lost. The replacement drive later displayed similar behavior, and was again replaced without incident, also under warranty. And the replacement for the replacement has been good ever since.

I wasn't crazy about the drive failures, but the warnings made the transitions nearly seamless.

It would seem to me that SSD's would be highly more susceptible to electrostatic damage such as power surges or lightning strikes than standard magnetic HD's that would occur in real-user situations than in controlled bench testing. It's quite possible that the problems that Joe M was having could be attributed to these types of issues.
The thing that I see different in the endurance tests is the fact that the SSD's that are being tested are not tested in real-time or in real-user situations where nature or human beings are a factor. For instance, the more time that is involved would allow for more lightning storms to roll through the area where the drive is or clumsy users dumping a Big Gulp on their laptop.

What were the failure criteria? I had a C: SSD loose its boot record in two years...which I considered failure. Once a drive fails in any way, I don't trust them any more. This one was replaced under warranty...with a "refurbished" drive....which I also don't trust and gave away.

Interesting report. But I'm one who has never had a conventional HDD fail.(Probably should not brag) What is missing in the test is a control group of equal number of conventional magnetic drives. Until the study is carried out in a truly scientific fashion....I'm still a doubter. I've heard too many stories of early failures of SSD's.

Guess, I am simply "old school." Even though the prices are falling, the SSDs are still too expensive, for my budget. I do like the idea, of the Hybrid Drive. It seems to be the "best" of both worlds, yet, still priced so much lower than the SSDs.

As I have said in past comments, I still have a couple of Hard Drives, that were manufactured in 2000 and 2001, that are working fine, with NO bad sectors. However, if, I am not mistaken ... The Hybrid Drives are mostly made by Seagate, not one of my favorite Hard Drive companies. But that, was a history way back in the late 90's, when I lost 3 Hard Drives, by Seagate/Maxtor. I do have an External Hard Drive by Seagate and so far, it's doing great, but then, an External HD doesn't constantly write and re-write data, all day long. It just "backs up" when I schedule it, to do so. Must admit, that puppy is mighty quiet, as is my Western Digital 1TB Hard Drive, in my Dell refurbished computer.

To think ... I started, back in Sept. 1996, with my very first computer, that was the "state of the art", with 1.3GB HD, 8MB memory module, the IBM MWave Sound Card/14.4 Modem (that was the worst Legacy PCI Card, ever on the planet!!!) and Windows 95B. One of the first things, I ever did to upgrade, was spend $64 for a 16MB Module Memory.

We talk about prices for computers today ... In all honesty, they don't even compare to what they were, when Personal Computers really started coming on board, for the rest of the world, not just the Business World. :)

Bob, How do the SSD data writes of 700 to 900 TB compare to average failure times on HHD's?

Very helpful. I actually followed the link and scanned the test. They're really pushing a lot of data, then deleting, then re-writing. Seems like an impressive test to a novice such as myself. From their article: "We're using 10GB of static data, including a copy of the Windows 7 installation folder, a handful of application files, and a few movies."

I have had 3 SSD failures on the same machine in the past 16 months! Fortunately, all were covered by warranty. So far, so good with the current drive, but I'm nervous.

2 SSDs from a company that makes CPUs have had boot issues after about 6mo and another 14mo. Tried several passes at Win7 repair and other similar fixes from the interweb and nothing worked. BUT the machine could boot if I went into BIOS and told it to boot of the SSD (i.e. select the SSD even though the SSD was already selected). Strange that the PC couldn't self start from the SSD but interactive BIOS intervention could.

Hmmm...interesting article Bob though I'm somewhat nonplussed by the reported results.

Sheesh! when our top scientists declare they have only learned about 4% of what the physical universe is composed off and probably less of what we humans are made off add to which the strong feeling I have the older I get the more unsolved mysteries I encounter to me it's unsafe to conclude absolutes by a single test or series of tests.

That is not to say we shouldn't keep trying though but be cognisant that whatever choices we make it is more than likely to be belief based rather than empirically based.

So when these drives finally failed, was the data on them lost? Or was it still readable, and the drive just stopped accepting new writes? I've read where these drives will eventually just stop letting you write/save or change data, but the existing data on the drives stays readable/accessible. I'm curious if there is any truth to this.

For those who have trepidations about going the SSD route but still want faster performance, please note that VelociRaptor HDDs running at 10k RPM are as speedy as you will get! Unfortunately, these WesternDigital HDDs are costly (@$179/1TB) but do come with 5 year warranties!Of course, you may further wish to review Bob Rankin's recent article on hybrid drives...

Howdy Bob!

All I can say is that it seems there is a *lot* more of the story to tell about the SSD, especially after reading just the few the questions asked.

At my age of 96 years is any MTBF of 3 years is OK. But like Brian I want to know if all failures are catastrophic, (immediate and total failure.) Or is the data salvageable? I also want to know if a second HDD can be used as a backup to SSD..

Great news! Thanks Bob.