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Analyzing Long-Term SSD Failure Rates

Posted by Soulskill on from the we'll-always-find-new-ways-to-break-new-technology dept.

wintertargeter writes "It looks like Tom's Hardware has posted the first long-term study of SSD failure rates. The chart on the last page is interesting — based on numbers, it seems SSDs aren't more reliable than hard drives. "

1 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whaddayamean "long term"? by TheLink · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you're unlucky backups won't save you from this:
    http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue

    yesterday I spent over an hour fomatting, re-installing windows and everything else I needed.

    Also updated windows fully, customized everything to my liking... in short, a good 2-3h of work.

    This morning, I open up the laptop and surprise... EVERYTHING's back to the pre-format. I have no idea how this is even remotely possible.

    OCZ is calling this the time warp issue, and is related to the sandforce controller...

    http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/552728-fresh-os-install-ocz-ssd-r3.html

    any firmware before 1.29 can result in you experiencing what OCZ refers to as "Time Warp" (you lose all info stored on drive since last boot - happens at random). 1.29 decreases likelihood of this happening, but does not eliminate the possibility.

    The big problem with this failure mode is the drive still appears to work. So if you are unlucky to not notice that the pricelist/tender document you are about to send or commit to is no longer showing the corrected figures/information, things could get way more painful than if your drive just didn't work (in which case work would just be delayed while you restore from backups, or if you have no backups you would just have to deal with the data loss).

    --