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Reliability of PC Flash SSDs?
An anonymous reader writes "SATA and IDE flash solid-state disks are all the rage these days — faster and, allegedly, more reliable than traditional spinning-rust disks. My organization dipped its toe in the flash-disk waters, buying a handful for some PC and Linux boxes. Out of 8 drives from various manufacturers, 3 have failed in the space of four months! Some are reporting bad blocks, others just crapped out and stopped responding entirely. (And no, this isn't a wear-leveling issue, nor were these machines in particularly harsh environmental conditions, nor were all failed drives from the same manufacturer.) So I ask you, the readers of Slashdot: what has your experience been like with basic, consumer-grade SATA or IDE flash drives? Are they failing for you too, or are we just unlucky? It's starting to remind me of the claims about long-lifetime compact fluorescent light bulbs that, in reality, have turned out to be BS!"
I have avoided investing any money into those types of drives for that very reason. As a small business owner I see customer units come in that make use of those types of devices and I see a lot of failure. I'm still being patient.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The junky 4gb ssd that came with my eee 900 died inside of a month. The 16gb OCZ SSD that I replaced it with has been going strong for a year now though /me crosses fingers
your not saying what chipset and what kind of usage you did.
if you are going to put a MLC drive for a gentoo distribution which is compiling 24/7, you will kill it in no time
if you got first gen micron chipset... you will have bad experience too
try again with indilinx or intel drive with SLC and come again
Make sure you turn of the scheduler for defragging in Windows or whatever OS you are using. Defragging those types of drives will effectively kill them.
in my everyday desktop are working fine since January, and they are the most used drives of the system, the smaller one being used to boot the system and store programs, the other storing program data and some DBs.
then to say "Some are reporting bad blocks, others just crapped out and stopped responding entirely..." is misleading.
You know the numbers, so tell them. If the total is 3, then you can't use a plural for two separate types of failures "some this, others that". That is just logically impossible if the number of failures is 3. Think about it.
Can you at least tell us which 3 of your 8 drives failed ? Perhaps there is some similarity in controller or Flash memory used?
FWIW, I have 2 of the Intel Drives and 1 OCZ drive and I haven't seen any problems.
I've got a pair of Dell Mini 9s, one with a 4gb SSD and the other a 32gb. Neither have had problems, although they only see maybe 1-2 hours of use daily. We also run a pair of Dell XPS laptops - one 1340, one 1640, both with the 128gb Samsung (IIRC) SSDs. Those systems are on and working 6-10 hours a day every day, no problems. All four of these systems run XP; the 4gb Mini 9 runs a lightened version. I've also got a home-built HTPC made out of mostly ASUS components running Win7RC on a Patriot 64gb SSD. It's on 24x7, though never sees heavy use - just streaming movies from various places. It's been flawless as well. I've not heard of any SSD reliability grand conspiracy - maybe your users have personal magnetic fields that disrupt the traditional and proper flow of electrons?
you mean the real world support for TRIM in Windows 7 and supported in Indilinx and Intel controllers?
the one that has been recently tested out on Anandtech and shown to have very positive results?
oh yeah, that one.
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html
He sorta knows what he's talking about more often than a random average slashdotter.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Cheap SSD drives fail more often then good, expensive ones. This is not shocking news. Or at least it shouldn't be. But the vast majority of consumers never look past the capacity and purchase price.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I have 7 Transcend SATA SSD's, 3 32GB and 4 192GB, one of the 192GB drives is flakey, random bad blocks and file curruption issues of files that had been fine but gone bad and have not been written to since their creation some months ago. I've reloaded it several times but eventually had to remove it from service because of its poor reliability.
Bad troll. I read the fine article linked in this claim. The claims are not BS... there have just been problems with the supply-chain doing cost-cutting, and with people using cheap CFLs inappropriately. It's important to note that the Energy Star ratings board has been retesting CFLs and revoking use of the label for CFLs that fail to meet the standard.
It's not BS... it just needs some refining. Don't use CFLs on a dimmer switch. Don't use them in poorly ventilated enclosures. Don't use CFLs in fixtures you turn off and on a lot.
A little bit of consumer education goes a long way... but unfortunately so does FUD like the submitter's.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My first response would be: "What type of computers are these being used in? Desktops? Servers? Laptops? Netbooks?"
My second response would be: "What systems settings have been changed so the OS is properly set up for an SSD drive?"
My third response would be: "What exact make and model drives are we talking about here?"
All of this is important in determining whether this is just another typical anecdotal ask slashtards to make me feel better type question, or whether you are seriously asking.
Without specifics, this is nothing more than a waste of time.
If all of the failed drives are of a specific manufacturer's netbook mini pcie based 4GB SSD drives, and all were having the same basic issue, then it's really an indication of a problem with one manufacturer's drives, and not SSD's as a whole now isn't it?
It's like saying all 1.5TB rotational hard drives suck and lose data becuase at one point seagate had tremendous firmware problems with their 1.5TB hdd's.
If on the other hand, it's several different drives, in different environments, from several different manufacturers and across several physically different types of SSD's (mini pcie, full size, etc) utilizing several different types of RAM and several different controllers, then it would suggest a more widespread problem.
You don't even have a large enough data sample to begin to answer these questions.
Me personally, I've got SSD drives in everything from my home desktop, to my work laptop, to a couple of small file servers, to two different Dell Mini 9's running aftermarket Runcore SSD's
All have been in use for at least a year (the work laptop is actually a Dell xps m1330 that is almost 2 years old and has a 64GB Samsung SSD in it).
All are working flawlessly and show no signs of dieing.
I got an OCZ Vertex 5 months and was very happy with the speed increase. Yesterday the laptop blue-screened and wouldn't boot any more. The BIOS test reported a read error. I am waiting for an RMA number from OCZ.
Depends a LOT on the quality of wiring and electricity that you have. CF bulbs have integrated electronics to get the power to what is needed to light up. If your house power is running out of spec, they can fail pretty quickly. Since an incandescent bulb has a large range of voltage that it'll respond and light up in, there's no problem with them in places with dirtier power.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Of course, it also means the vendor gets a copy of whatever is on the drive... Confidential company information, personal data, furry pr0n...
Clever, in a completely unrelated way. What if a company (say they were operating out of a country not completely allied with the US) were to create a SSD device that had logic to "incapacitate" itself at some rate after it had been used to store enough information, before the warranty had expired, and not often enough (across the population) to raise suspicion. The disk could be a sort of new age Trojan horse, sneaking in, and back out with valuable, undetected all the while.
LED bulbs are going to render CFL bulbs a flash in the pan
no toxic mercury, no 30 second wait to dim up completely after turn on, not nearly as fragile, lasts much longer, nicer white glow, similar very low energy usage...
but currently, they are a little pricey and their lighting wattage is low
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/coming-soon-a-40-watt-led-light-bulb/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Linus updated his SSD post 5 months later and in the follow-up mentioned, among other things, an AnandTech article he liked at least parts of.
I come here for the love
There's no public trim on the Intel controllers yet.
Do you mean the experimental trim support in the beta Indilinx firmwares that caused data corruption when your computer went into sleep? Great! Those drivers got pulled for obvious reasons.
The offline 'trim' doesn't count btw, it's not using the trim command and you have to run it manually periodically rather than it running automatically when the disk's idle.
Trim will be great but don't pretend it's available.
Thank you. The brands/models were the critical piece of information.
You're probably aware that SSD's have been in the server space, at a very different price point, for a few years now, without any extraordinary reliability debacles. To some extent, this is a case of getting what you pay for. I did a moderate amount of research on SSD drives, relying especially on the independent review sites, and quickly eliminated all of the brands you described.
As is frequent in fairly new markets, there are a few smaller and less well-run companies trying to dive in, and their first customers get to beta test their v0.* and v1.* offerings.
The prevailing wisdom seemed to me (and to people like i.e. Torvalds) that Intel was far and away the top of the heap in terms of performance and reliability, and some drives based on a newer Samsung controller (i.e. OCZ Summit) were a perhaps credible alternative. Other brands were clearly struggling to even be in the game, with frequent firmware updates and outright debacles (i.e. Indilinux, Micron) and we're in the process of shaking out who will make it and who will not.
I have only fielded a few consumer-grade SSDs over about the same amount of time as you, but going with Intel's G1 and G2 MLC products has so far yielded zero failures.
If you are already in the market for an SSD, and you are ready to spend premium money for premium performance, you should go the whole distance and go with Intel, the current market leader. See also the latest news on these models.
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I have 3 Lights of America CFLs laying right next to me. They started flickering only a few months after install, and died less than a year later. They should have lasted at least 5 years according to the warranty.
My GE CFLs come on nice-and-bright but they are limited in usage, because they are "swirls" and most of my lights don't accept swirls. They require traditional round bulbs.
My Philips CFLs provide that nice round bulb, but they are slow to reach full brightness, which is rather annoying. The 60-watt-equivalent bulb hanging upside-down in my kitchen is sometimes so dim, it looks like a brown dwarf star... barely any light at all.
In brief:
- CFLs hate temperature extremes. CFLs hate dimmers. CFLs hate being turned on and off.
- The savings on CFLs is trivial. I'm not seeing smaller monthly bills.
- In fact I'm actually *wasting* money because of failed experiments with the LOA and Philips bulbs.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A moot point maybe since everyone agrees already..
But I noticed that Windows 7 detects SSD (even in a RAID config with the on-board ICH controller) and automatically turns off defrag on them.
Nice !
It really depends on the brand of the bulb. I've had a few Philips that were bought in the 90's, used every night dusk till dawn outside, and they lasted 10+ years. In our school dorms, I replaced a few spots in the common area with a few of the older looped (not squared-off) Ikea 11W'ers. Light's are on 24/7/365. 6 of the 8 are at 2+ years now, that's almost 20,000 hours, on -already used- bulbs.
We replaced all the hall lights in the dorms with 13 watt and 20 watt CFL's, for a total of about 45 bulbs. All GE brand....4 have failed after 18 months of 24/7/365. The rest are still going strong. That's still way above their spec of 8,000hrs IIRC.
I've used a few FEIT and Lights Across America. One LAA had a "bad failure", where the ballast base actually started smoking. The FEIT's had a pretty wide range of color temp, for being the same model.
For organizations such as ourselves where we have areas that need to be lit 24/7/365, the savings are very easily calculated. In the 24/7 sockets, with myself and a student worker volunteering our time to purchase and install the bulbs, the cost of the bulb payed for itself in electric savings (city industrial rate, $0.141/kwh) in less than 5 weeks, over the 65W incan floods they replaced. Crazy.
There's an obvious reason why it won't work for classified stuff; if a disk on the classified network fails it doesn't go back for warranty repair, it gets smashed with a sledge hammer and then melted with thermite and the failure rate is taken into consideration when deciding to buy from that manufacturer again.
Most companies have less strict rules, however. You could quite easily write a disk controller that would scan for keywords in every block that was written and fail after a key phrase had been used a certain number of times. This would mean you'd only get failures on disks used for storing commercially sensitive information.
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I only use them on the outside garage fixtures that our neighborhood covenant requires that I leave on all night. (They're on a light-sensing switch.) Despite the promises, they manage to only last about a year or two.
There's your problem, light sensing switches (and dimmers) will absolutely destroy most CFLs. I'm surprised they lasted over a year. Your typical light sensing switch isn't equivalent to a regular light switch that flips on and off based on the amount of light.
There's a couple of problems with photosensor switches. First, around dusk and dawn it may flicker on and off, which shortens the life of CFLs (but not cold-cathode CFLs, which are ok with rapid cycling). Second, even when completely "off", many photosensor switches will leak a bit of current, which may mess with your CFL's electronics, anything less than full-on / full-off is bad. Third, some photosensors and dimmers may have built-in "bulb saver" features meant to extend the life of incandescents -- they may pass the current through a diode or negativetemperature coefficient (NTC) thermistor (which again will kill CFLs).
If they're smart, and like all the standard electronic amenities that most people do, they'll spend the money. It isn't just CF bulbs that die early from poor power sources. TVs, DVD players, stereos, PCs, and any other electronic device can all meet early deaths because of dirty power. Many people don't even realize this and just think they're "cursed" when buying electronics. It'd be interesting to see someone do some research to see how much money is lost every year do to prematurely destroyed electronics equipment and whether fixing all the houses with poor power sources might be a major source of environmental improvement in it's own right.
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#1 - The DM is always right.
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I work for a company that bought a bunch of Dell Mini 9 laptops with SSDs to use for field reprogramming of microcontrolled electrical equipment in the field. It worked great in the lab but failed in the field. The SSDs would suddenly be "wiped" with the OS gone. We eventually gave up on using them, but some investigation did indicate that there was a ground loop between the laptop and the electrical device. The same problem never happened on any of the regular disk drive laptops that we were also using.
Reminds me of some religious types. "If it ain't in the book, I don't believe it."
There's a big difference between religion and relying on a reasonably unbiased testing company like consumer reports.
Your bias against CFLs approaches religion more. I think it was last month that we had quite the discussion about them.
BTW, I just had my first CFL blow on me - it still produced a visible glow, but no longer lit like the 100W equivalent it's supposed to be. It was in the bathroom, and a transplant from the time I lived in an apartment. It saw at least 5 years of usage, it predated the time I started writing the install date on the base in permanent marker.
I don't read AC A human right
...you just have to buy quality stuff. About 10 years ago, we bought five standing lamps, each with 3x32watt dimmable bulbs. The electronics in the lamp are specifically designed to dim CFLs, and the CFLs are designed to be dimmed. The total price for each lamp (they are nice lamps) was several hundred dollars. However, in 10 years, we have replaced only one bulb. The warm-up time is negligible and the light quality is excellent.
Hot-wire bulbs are a throw-away product. You just can't look at CFLs the same way: you are buying an electronic appliance that ought to last for years. Either spend for quality, or use some other kind of lighting.
You get what you pay for.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I live in an area that isn't serviced by an electric company, so I have a small solar array. My power is always a perfectly clean 117 volts at the wall (at least until my inverter fails, I guess). I still have all of the CF bulbs I bought 15 years ago at $30 each. A friend who has normal electrical service bought some of the same ones at the same time, and none of them lasted more than three years. So, yeah, electrical quality is important.