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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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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)
Thats a silly thing to do. Lets examine this, shall we?
A 5% chance to lose 2TB vs a 1.5% chance to lose 250GB.
You argue that since it requires 8 of these 250GB SSD's to equal the capacity of the 2TB HDD that we should multiply 1.5% by 8, so a 12% chance... a 12% chance of what, tho? In actuality, there isnt a 12% chance of anything...
The chance of losing at least 1 of those 8 SSD's (that is specifically 1 or more) over the period is (1 - (1 - 0.015)) = 0.114, but the chance of losing all of those 8 drives over the period is 0.015^8 = 0.0000000000000025628906. In other words, losing all 2TB in the SSD scenario is effectively never going to happen while it remains 5% for the HDD scenario.
The actual breakdown of all possibilities of drive failings (0 drives, 1 drive, 2 drives, etc..) rounded to thousands of a percent is:
0 drives: 88.611%
1 drives: 10.795%
2 drives: 0.575%
3 drives: 0.000%
4 drives: 0.000%
5 drives: 0.000%
6 drives: 0.000%
7 drives: 0.000%
8 drives: 0.000%
So we see that you would be twice as likely to lose some data than in the HDD scenario, but invariably it will only be 250GB of data instead of 2TB of data (only 1 in 173 of these 8 drive experiments will witness more than 1 drive fail, and the majority of those will be exactly 2 drives failed)
So no, you do not need to multiply the failure rate of the SSD's by the number of SSD's that you would need to equal the HDD. What you need to do is define the problem better because as it stands SSD's look a hell of a lot better when you suppose that you need a pile of them.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
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