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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. "

3 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by adamjcoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I didn't read TFA but the chart doesn't tell me that "SSDs aren't more reliable than hard drives".. the SSDs were generally 6% or under (assuming the linear progression) whereas regular HDD approached 14%+ after five years. And "Long-term" in the title? The SSD data in the chart only goes for 1 year. Not exactly long term when the chart goes from 1-5 years of use. The actual data for the SSDs is only 20% of the time span.

  2. Re:Uh, yes they are by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Did the poster even look at the chart he linked to?

    Did you? Apparently not.

    Ignore the dashed lines-- those curves are not data, they are "projection." The chart has no data on SSD failures late in the lifetime. So, when you say "...SSD failures only exceed HD failures very early on in their lifetimes," that is equivalent to saying "SSD failures only exceed HD failures in the region of the graph for which there is data."

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    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  3. 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).

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