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SSD Annual Failure Rates Around 1.5%, HDDs About 5%
Lucas123 writes "On the news that Linus Torvalds's SSD went belly up while he was coding the 3.12 kernel, Computerworld took a closer look at SSDs and their failure rates. While Torvalds didn't specify the SSD manufacturer in his blog, he did write in a 2008 blog that he'd purchased an 80GB Intel SSD — likely the X25, which has become something of an industry standard for SSD reliability. While they may have no mechanical parts, making them preferable for mobile use, there are many factors that go into an SSD being reliable. For example, a NAND die, the SSD controller, capacitors, or other passive components can — and do — slowly wear out or fail entirely. As an investigation into SSD reliability performed by Tom's Hardware noted: 'We know that SSDs still fail.... All it takes is 10 minutes of flipping through customer reviews on Newegg's listings.' Yet, according to IHS, client SSD annual failure rates under warranty tend to be around 1.5%, while HDDs are near 5%. So SSDs not only outperform, but on average outlast spinning disks."
"client SSD annual failure rates under warranty tend to be around 1.5%, while HDDs are near 5%"
So they are less likely to fail early in their life.
NOT:
"So an SSDs not only outperforms, but on average outlast spinning disk."
This is completely unsubstantiated by the evidence provided.
So you need to multiply the failure rate of the SSD by as many SSDs as it would take to equal the storage of the disc. Do you want the storage rate per arbitrary device size, or rate of failure per data stored?
errr
1.5% of a 4TB SSD that sells for USD$29,000 is roughly 60 GB = $425.
Alright, I'll do the math....
9ms average access times on a 7200RPM spinning drive == ~100 IOPS.
High-end SSD: 100K IOPS.
Yes, a thousand times the number of disk accesses. If you're really a developer, you'll see your compile times cut by a factor of 5-10 (depending on how much CPU power you have to spare). Things load from disk like magic.
You don't buy SSDs for the raw capacity, you buy them for the *fast* access times. Period.
Is 4TB representative? Or are you just putting more spin on this story?
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
5 years should be mandatory by law. If you can't support your drive for 5 years, you shouldn't be allowed to manufacture hard drives at all.
I don't understand this new trend in making new hard drives with only 1-2 years warranty. The same goes for SSD.
9ms average access times on a 7200RPM spinning drive == ~100 IOPS.
High-end SSD: 100K IOPS.
The SSD that most consumers are using are neither high end nor have such IOPS ratings.
Bullcrap. They can be replaced. Look up http://macsales.com/ they sell several sizes for the airs and the pro retinas.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
While catastrophic drive failures make headlines what's more likely to happen during the useful service life of both HDDs and SSDs are unrecoverable media/bit errors and these may ruin your day as much as a catastrophic error. If you look at the bit error rate of any contemporary HDD and compare it to its capacity you'll come to a startling conclusion - an unrecoverable read error is rated to occur once every 2 to 5 times the full capacity of the drive is read. SSDs have about the same unrecoverable read error rate.
Yet, according to IHS, client SSD annual failure rates under warranty tend to be around 1.5%, while HDDs are near 5%. So an SSDs not only outperforms, but on average outlast spinning disk."
The unknown in the equation is the length of the warranty periods for the drives used in the comparison.
Anyone who isnt using a SSD by now for at least their boot drive is stuck in the past.
It's the single best upgrade you can make anymore.
Either way stop the fucking articles about it.
Leave them with their warm feelings for spinning rust full of multi gigs of stuff they never touch.
They'll wise up eventually. Or not.
Either way it won't hurt you any. Enjoy your speedy pc and laugh at the rusties if you must.
> as a developer, I have no use for SSD in my desktop system.
Do you compile code?
SSDs are for booting. RAM disks are for compiling, and hdd is for long term storage.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
5% of a 4TB HDD that sells for USD$200 is roughly 200 GB = $10.
1.5% of a 4TB HDD that sells for USD$29,000 is roughly 60 GB = $425.
You mean 5% of the space size in GB is that.
Your math is wrong, because you are misinterpreting the statistics. A 1.5% SSD failure rate, with a small number of disks, does not mean that "1.5% of the capacity" fails; if you purchased N 4TB SSD "that sells for 29k"; on average N*1.5% Of those entire SSD drives fail; and if you purchased N 4 TB HDDs that sell for $200, N*5% of those entire HDDs fail.
Due to I/O constraints; when you use HDDs, you don't get to use all your total space, before performance degrades to unacceptable levels, and you have to buy more HDDs; furthermore, all those extra HDDs consume a lot more power than SSDs. The $/IOP is not attractive for HDDs: the vast majority of computer users do not need 4TB HDDs; and will use 100 to 150GB TOPS.
Therefore: SSDs look a lot more attractive, when you discount, or forget the existence of the portion of the capacity that the user cannot use due to performance constraints, or will not use -- due to not needing the space.
Last I checked; you cannot go to Amazon, Newegg or your local supermarket and buy a 200GB hard drive for $10 It is not an option; the least cost new HDD you can pick up is about 60 bucks. However, you definitely can go to Newegg, and buy a new 150GB SSD for about $250.
Also, the Crucial M500 1TB SSD is $600. 4 times that is $2400, not $30,000.
4TBs are for archival purposes, where the hard drive will be powered off most of the time, anyways. The failure rate of 3 TB and 4 TB HDDs is probably much higher than the 5% average, due to the tighter mechnical tolerances and higher density encoding methods required. I believe the 5% figure applies to 1.5TB disks.
Actually, you'd be surprised. The Samsung 840 EVO, a low-cost consumer drive (the high-end is the 840 Pro) that gets down to $0.70/GB, can hit 90K IOPS read on every model, and 90K IOPS write on 500GB models and up.
Sure, older or ultra-cheap drives won't hit that (my new Chronos doesn't get there), but rounding to the nearest order of magnitude will get you 100K IOPS even on medium-end consumer drives.
OCZ's failure rates are higher than the rest of the industry's by an order of magnitude. Also, earlier SandForce drives have reliability problems because the firmware was written by paranoid loons who were deathly afraid of reverse-engineering and the drive goes into irrecoverable 'panic mode' when any abnormality of any kind is sensed. I think that newer SandForces (post-LSI acquisition), especially Intel's, are less likely to do this, but the original failures still taint the brand with the stigma of flakiness.
If you stick with Samsung, Intel, and SanDisk, you should be fine. Stay away from OCZ at all costs, and be skeptical of any SandForce drive not made by Intel.
A while back Joel Spolsky (joel on software) tried switching to an SSD and compared his compile times to his old HDD. The result: no difference. Apparently, the disk access isn't the slow part of the compilation process. The bottleneck in compiling seems to be the processor speed.
You might want to factor in that SSD's often have longer warranties than HDD's these days.
OCZ's SSD's are 3-year while Intel SSD's are 5-year. HDD's manufacturers reduced their warranties from 3,4, or 5 year to 1, 2, or 3 year in 2011.
I'm not saying that thats the situation of the data in the study, but it could be. 5% on an average 2 year warranty vs 1.5% on an average 4 year warranty, well that is quite a significant difference.
"His name was James Damore."
Now for the useful information. How many of the failed SSD's were they able to recover data? I suspect not many.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Wait, you are basing the improvements in compile times on one guy's anecdotal results? Well, here's another: when I switched to an SSD at work my compile times were cut by more than half. It was an huge difference in compile time ie. productivity.
It all depends on your codebase and tools, really. He was probably compiling a relatively small codebase, and for all we know his methodology sucked so a lot of it was in the RAM cache. I can tell you for a fact that a clean build on a large code base was drastically improved.
No he's doing the math right -- At an annual failure rate of 1%, you need to replace 1% of your total capacity every year. With an annualized failure rate of 5%, you need to replace 5% of that capacity overall. The averaging is done because over time, it works out, just like insurance. Sure, on any given year *if* a drive fails, you have to pay for the whole thing, but that's not how one accounts for such failures.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Fairly large codebase here, ~4 minute compile times, C++ with Visual Studio. Compile times were unaffected by the SSD upgrade. Searching code, however, massive speed improvement and paid itself off with productivity improvements after about a month.
And everything you said reinforces my statement, "It all depends on your codebase and tools, really" :) Not everyone (in fact, probably very few) get to pick all of the tools and libs that they use...
I had to do a clean build today, actually. And it was unavoidable. I upgraded my PS4 SDK, and not doing a clean build when your entire libc/SDK/etc changes is practically a guarantee of random impossible to track down errors in your app. Due to quirks of the existing system, that particular build was almost 5x faster on my machine vs. a coworker's using a slower, non-SSD machine. 1/2 hour saved times 2-3 clean builds easily pays for the disk already.
Spectacularly poorly, in my experience, for the kinds of things I do.
And the thing to remember about all storage is that it will fail. If you have a single disk in a machine, and that machine is not backed up properly, then you will lose that data in the next 5 years.
SSDs are for booting. RAM disks are for compiling, and hdd is for long term storage.
RAM disks are for compiling? how small are you projects?
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
How is a MacBook Air a netbook? An i5, 8gigs rams, SSD, I can plug it into my monitor when I get home. It's also as powerfull as medium-grade desktop. What's is missing?
I hate to bring it to you, but an MBA is exactly like any other ultrabook out there.
You may want to look into a power conditioner.
My laptop drive is 7 years old (runs XP).
My desktop drive is close to 5 years old.
I use them a lot.
They were on for about 3 years solid tho I've been putting them to sleep the last year.
Your failure rate seems suspiciously high.
I also have several USB drives of similar ages.
The only drives I've ever lost were 3 flash drives. Two of them mini drives which got very hot during use. And an old 88 mb drive back in the 90's. (cost me $88!)
I still back up frequently.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You forgot to mention the wonderful way Sandforce controllers encrypt the data with a key that you (the drive's owner) aren't allowed to have, so your ONLY data recovery option (on the rare occasions when it MIGHT be an option) is to pay an extortionate amount of money to one of Sandforce's "trusted partners" to decrypt it for you... and apparently, they actually charge more money to do what's now a 100% automated software-based recovery than the same companies USED to charge to remove the platters from a conventional hard drive in a cleanroom and mount them in a recovery unit.
I'm frankly surprised that some company like OCZ hasn't come up with an "innovative" new-economy (as in, "fuck you, consumer!") business model for SSDs, like selling 256-gig drives for $25 that lock themselves after some random period of time between 180 and 720 days after first use, and charge $2,000 for the key to unlock the drive (decreasing to $1,000 after a week, $500 after a month, $250 after 6 months, $125 after a year, and $64 after 2 years). Is there anybody who doubts that netbook manufacturers would pee their pants with glee if they could take advantage of that kind of "innovation"?
All this discussion on this and no one has commented that TFA is from 2011??
This article isn't reliable information. It's from when SSDs were relatively new and definitely doesn't apply to the in-the-field results people are seeing in 2013.
Reeses
What about putting 2 SSDs into a software RAID 1 configuration? Does that solve the problem?
What you said is my experience, also. I haven't had catastrophic failure of a HDD in perhaps 20 years in a population of perhaps 15 computers. In my experience what most often fails is the HDD electronics, so it is possible to extract the data by temporarily replacing the HDD electronics with a circuit board from another, identical HDD. Also, of course, in the last 20 years we have replaced HDDs because of frequently replacing computers.
They sell several amounts of already soldered chips on the main board.
Not soldered to the motherboard for the 15" Retina MBP and not soldered to the motherboard for the 13" Retina MBP. On which Macs is the SSD soldered to the motherboard?
Out of 15 SSD tested, only 2 are failure proof under power fault (only one maker and model).
(yes, I've read the pdf)
I'd like to know who is the winner, the anonymous vendor/model called "A-2".
It is not the most expensive, almost the cheapest, but it has at least a power-loss protection.
Another vendor has power-loss protection but his models failed the tests.
Direct link to pdf and figures erratum.
Bit Corruption: SSD#11, SSD#12, SSD#15
Flying Writes: none
ShornWrites: SSD#5, SSD#14, SSD#15
UnserializableWrites: SSD#2, SSD#4, SSD#7, SSD#8, SSD#9, SSD#11, SSD#12, SSD#13, HDD#1
Metadata Corruption: SSD#3
Dead Device: SSD#1
No failure: SSD#6, SSD#10, HDD#2
Their last word conclusion :
We recommend system builders either not use SSDs for important information that needs to be durable or that they test their actual SSD models carefully under actual power failures beforehand. Failure to do so risks massive data loss.
Thanks again for this link to the Usenix study, too bad you posted anon (patent need mod up).
I have a build machine that has 24 cores, 256GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD, and 4TB of spinning rust. Building on the SSD is significantly faster than the spinning rust (factor of 2-4 depending on what you're building). Building on the RAM disk is probably 1-2% faster, but within the noise for subsequent runs. I often put the object files on the RAM disk though. It doesn't seem to impact performance, but it means that the OS never has to bother writing them out to disk, which should help the SSD last longer when I'm generating 2-30GB of object files per build.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
OK LOL!
HDD give you plenty of warning now. In fact most of SMART tech, and a host of other things to run continuous tests looking for potential failure, as well as OS that specifically look for indications as well. Now.
Years ago, this was not the case. You MIGHT get some warning depending on how it decided to fail (bad sectors etc.,,), however most back in the day gave you about one second of actually notice before dying in a grinding crunching sound, or in a small black puff of smoke. I suppose in that light, you aren't wondering what the matter is, as you know it died, as it had the good measure to give a last death rattle before departing into the dark night.
Backups had to be done all the time, because at any time, it could go poof. Now you get like a weeks warning and can go pick up an external drive at your leisure (which is what I did the last time I had a HD fail).
The reason we have the protections is because they were so bad, and consumers demanded better drives, driven by consumers. SSD drives have only been mainstream commercial for a handful of years. It is pretty new technology compared to HDD. Give them a second to catch up!