

The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale - AndrewDucker
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

======
portman
A couple of additional points about my abysmal 8/8 failure rate:

    
    
      - These were in 8 different machines in 8 different locations.
      - 7 were in desktops, 1 was a laptop
      - All were running Windows
      - All purchased from NewEgg
      - Most of these were gifts for other people. 
    

(I may be slightly crazy, but I don't have 8 computers.)

After this saga, I've concluded that there are probably two root causes
leading to high failure rates:

(1) _Something_ about installing an after-market SSD in a desktop, probably
related to power fluctuations, increases the likelihood of failure.

(2) NewEgg only offers a 30-day warranty on their SSDs. You can't even
purchase a third-party extended warranty. So I suspect that you'll see a
higher failure rate from NewEgg purchases than from a merchant who offers a 2-
or 3-year warranty. (But NewEgg's prices are so damn good!)

I should also say that the SSDs that I have purchased with laptops - 2 from
Dell (2008, 2009) and 1 from IBM (2009) have _not_ failed.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
As for (1), unless you specifically go purchase a quality PSU, the PSU you get
in a pre-built machine is usually utter trash as far as output quality is
considered. (This is probably a fault of the ATX standard, which frankly
allows too much leeway. Many parts that could otherwise use the voltages
provided by the PSU have to include their own power regulation circuitry
simply because the direct PSU output is too noisy) It's a good idea to build
your own computer from newegg or similar just to know the PSU you'll get.

Other than that, there's no difference if the SSD is plugged in by "a trained
professional" or yourself.

~~~
ZoFreX
Agreed. Never, ever skimp on the PSU, even for a budget build. It's a false
economy (which, in the worst case scenario, could result in you replacing the
PSU and every other piece of hardware too).

If you're not sure if your PSU is good or not, pick it up and see how heavy it
is. If it has a fair bit of heft, it's probably good. If it feels light, it's
definitely bad.

------
jswanson
This post has some pretty decent hard stats. Not scientific, but less
anecdotal than the linked article.

[http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd-
fa...](http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29329-ssd-failure-
rates-compared-to-hard-drives/)

 _To be recorded the VAS had to be made directly through the merchant, which
is not always the case since it is possible to return directly from the
manufacturer: however, this represents a minority in the first year.

\- Maxtor 1.04% (against 1.73%) \- Western Digital 1.45% (against 0.99%) \-
Seagate 2.13% (against 2.58%) \- Samsung 2.47% (against 1.93%) \- Hitachi
3.39% (against 0.92%)

Hitachi is plummeting, which was first in the previous ranking! Western
Digital retained its second place despite a failure rate increasing, while
Maxtor is occupying the first place.

More specifically the failure rate for 1TB drives:

\- 5.76% Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B \- 5.20% Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C \- 3.68%
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 \- 3.37%: Samsung SpinPoint F1 \- 2.51% Seagate
Barracuda 7200.12 \- 2.37%: WD Caviar Green WD10EARS \- 2.10% Seagate
Barracuda LP \- 1.57%: Samsung SpinPoint F3 \- 1.55%: WD Caviar Green WD10EADS
\- 1.35%: WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS \- 1.24%: Maxtor DiamondMax 23

Hitachi is logically the less well placed, what with two separate lines! What
about the 2 TB version?

\- 9.71%: WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS \- 6.87% Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 \-
4.83%: WD Caviar Green WD20EARS \- 4.35% Seagate Barracuda LP \- 4.17%:
Samsung EcoGreen F3 \- 2.90%: WD Caviar Green WD20EADS

Overall, failure rates recorded are bad. That does not really want to entrust
to 2TB of data to these discs alone: a mirroring will not be too much for
securing data. Logically 7200 rpm disks are less reliable than the 5400/5900
rpm, with almost 10% for the Western model!

For the first time, we also integrate SSDs in this article type. The rates of
failure recorded by manufacturer:

\- Intel 0.59% \- Corsair 2.17% \- Crucial 2.25% \- Kingston 2.39% \- OCZ
2.93%

Intel stands here with a failure rate of the most flattering. Among the few
models sold over 100 copies, displays a rate of no more than 5% VAS._

~~~
doe88
Here are comparable numbers for SSD from another source [1] (this site is
affiliated with an online computers shopping site).

Intel 0,3%, Kinston 1,2%, Crucial 1,9%, Corsair 2,7%, OCZ 3,5%.

[1] [http://www.hardware.fr/articles/831-7/taux-pannes-
composants...](http://www.hardware.fr/articles/831-7/taux-pannes-
composants.html)

Edit: and on last page of the previous link there is a list of the current
models sold between 10/01/2010 and 04/01/2011 with the worst fiability track
record:

6,7%: OCZ Agility 2 120 Go. 3,7%: OCZ Agility 2 60 Go. 3,6%: OCZ Agility 2 40
Go. 3,5%: OCZ Agility 2 90 Go. 3,5%: OCZ Vertex 2 240 Go

~~~
barrkel
Simplistically assuming a very high failure rate of 7%, Jeff's friend anecdote
of 8 out of 8 failures has a probability of about 0.07^8 or about 1 in 2
billion. That's quite a lottery to win.

What this tells me is that there are probably some differences in the
environment that you use your SSD in that can have disproportionate effects on
its lifetime.

~~~
jacques_chester
You assume that only 8 of Jeff's acquaintances bought SSDs. It might actually
have been 8 failures out of 100 purchases, for example.

~~~
barrkel
Did you read the article? I'm referring to this: "Portman Wills, [...] he went
all in. He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years ... and all of them
failed".

~~~
jacques_chester
I stand corrected.

I admit that I tend to skim Jeff Atwood because his occasional tasty flakes of
insight are thickly coated with delicious but useless fluff.

------
stcredzero
Read this if you are concerned about TRIM and want to restore a SSD drive on
OS X to a "new" state.

If you have an SSD on OS X, I discovered that in many cases you can "reset"
the drive and regain performance. Basically, if your drive implements the
"security erase" command, you can use the following procedure by taking the
cover off the back of your Macbook, removing the hard drive, leaving the SATA
cable in reach, and booting with the GParted Live CD.

[http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?76612...](http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?76612-Secure-
Erase-From-Within-Linux-For-Windows-Users)

The tricky part: You have to plug in the SSD drive _> after<_ your machine
boots, so it's not in "frozen" state. The other tricky part, is that you first
have to set a security password to do the erase. Then doing the secure erase
also erases the password.

I know first-hand that this works on Crucial C300 RealSSD and I've seen lots
of reports that this works with OCZ drives. This is also useful for doing new
installs on an SSD if you've gotten a new machine. (My situation)

WARNING: DO NOT try to use a Crucial C300 SSD with an i5 or i7 2011 13"
Macbook Pro. The problem is in the hardware, namely electromagnetic
interference in the SATA cable when trying to use 6GB/s SATA. Wrapping it with
aluminum foil doesn't always work. Buying an upgraded SATA cable doesn't
always work either. Buying a 2010 Macbook Pro instead always works. You have
been warned.

~~~
jonah
Or you could just enable TRIM [1] on your 3rd Party SSD under Snow Leopard
[2].

[1] <http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322>

[2] <http://imgur.com/gKtL6>

~~~
stcredzero
I've seen this, but I've also seen some reservations about whether this is
safe. I think secure erase plus garbage collection will hold me until I get
TRIM in OS X Lion.

------
AndrewDucker
Personally, I think he's crazy.

I don't care how fast a computer is if I have to reinstall it from scratch
every few months.

Sure, all my working files are safely on Dropbox (documents) or GitHub (code),
but that doesn't help when I have to reinstall my operating system and
software every three months!

~~~
yatsyk
1\. You can backup entire partition

2\. Restoring of Windows machine with lot of software very annoying and takes
a lot of time (clicking dumb "I agree", and reboot the computer now, entering
serials etc...) but with ubuntu or os x it's less annoying experience. Good
package manager calculate dependencies for software. The only exception is
when you need to install some proprietary software (less frequently than on
windows) or you need edge version.

~~~
mooism2
I have a shell script that installs all the packages I need on a fresh Ubuntu
install, but

1\. I only tend to update it after running it and finding that something I was
expecting to be installed wasn't (really I should switch to using
puppet/cdist/similar for this)

2\. I have to set up Firefox manually (downloading extensions etc)

~~~
mike-cardwell
Put your Firefox profile in a Dropbox directory?

------
darren_
Other comments are assuming this is flash wearing out, but is this actually
the flash wearing out or is it something else (buggy firmware, cheap memory
cells, what have you)? The time-to-failure seems way too low for it to be
excessive writes (15 days for an 80GB IBM!).

Actually, come to think of it, what is the failure mode for a drive when it's
all worn out? Is it catastrophic data loss or is it just an unwritable drive?

~~~
Symmetry
Theoretically it should just be an unwritable drive since flash tends to only
fail on erase. If the firmware is badly programmed or something other than the
flash fails who knows what could happen though.

~~~
kabdib
There is a "read disturbance effect" on MLC flash that causes wear on reads.
MLC flash gets multiple bits per cell using several voltage levels.

MLC flash is also around 5K erase cycles (and about the same number of reads
until you need to do an erase-and-rewrite). Multiplied out and properly wear-
leveled this is not a big deal.

We might be seeing crappy wear leveling, or badly written firmware, or the
need for more ECC bits (yes, MLC has these, and they are /not/ optional) than
the EE types think they can get away with.

I've been writing flash file systems since 1991. They're fun as hell to work
with.

~~~
adbge
> I've been writing flash file systems since 1991. They're fun as hell to work
> with.

Could you recommend any good resources for someone new to file system
technology that is interested in their inner-workings? Thanks!

~~~
kabdib
Practical File System Design: <http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/practical-file-
system-design.pdf>

NT File System Design (Rajeev Nagar) -- you can find this used. I believe his
web site had a PDF copy for a while, sans pictures.

My favorite book on transactions is Bernstein's Principles of Transaction
Processing (may also be available as a PDF somewhere, from the author).

Read the v6 Unix file system code. That will date me, but it's /simple/ and it
works. You can move up from there.

btrfs is neat. I haven't looked at the code.

------
Erwin
I wonder how well the SMART stats would predict that failure -- or whether
they were sudden unexplained failures.

If you run smartctl -A on your SDD device then for e.g. Intel you can see
attribute 0xE9 or 233 -- media wear indicator, starting at 100% (mine's at 98%
after 14 months, so this should hopefully indicate 2% of the wear out from
writes). You can also see how many of the reserved blocks it's used (when it
fails to reflash a cell when rewriting).

------
kaffeinecoma
I've been following Jeff's SSD stories for a while now, and I came here today
thinking maybe it was time for me to take the plunge and get one myself. But
this latest post just frightens me.

Even if you can avoid catastrophe with regular, automated backups (I use two
Time Machine drives myself), what about bitrot? If the SSD you've been
diligently backing up over months has been slowly rotting, can you have any
faith at all in the backups?

~~~
simpleTruth
The general assumption with SSD is you have both a SSD and a traditional HDD.
As long as you only have program and temp files on a SSD it's loss can have
fairly minimal impact. Especially, if you schedule a full disk backup of your
SSD weekly. Worst, case you lose a few OS/browser patches ship back the SSD
for a replacement drive and move on.

PS: If you want to get fancy you can set up a bootable partition on your HDD
and then backup the SSD to that partition.

~~~
btucker
What makes you say that's the general assumption? As far as I know the vast
majority of machines shipping with SSDs are shipping with ONLY an SSD, not two
drives. Are you saying Apple's (for example) assumption is you're going to
cary around an external HDD with your MacBook to store your files on?

~~~
moe
The general assumption (or rather disclaimer) is: make backups.

An earlier failure may even be an advantage here because that way you have
less time to accumulate important data before learning your lesson...

------
joshu
And people wonder why women have trouble getting into this industry.

~~~
StavrosK
Because... they like their disks to not fail?

~~~
allenbrunson
did you not notice the article's comparison between SSD drives and "hot/crazy
women?" it was highly offensive.

~~~
StavrosK
That was from a show, and I imagine the same goes for guys. I didn't find it
sexist at all.

~~~
ajross
No, I'm with the OP on this. In the show, this kind of thing works because
part of the schtick of the Barney character is that he's a sexist jerk.
Everyone knows it, so you can riff off that to say things you can't in
isolation.

Here, there's none of that context. Drives, like women, are irreparably either
hot or crazy and the only question left to users (or men) is whether they're
"worth it". That's just sexist, sorry. The only people who have an excuse for
thinking its not are the ones who get the sitcom reference.

~~~
Helianthus
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I think there is an impulse to label
things sexist without addressing it, so I'm gonna ask a few questions.

If a woman wrote this about men, would it be sexist? (I expect you'll say
yes.)

If a lesbian woman wrote this about other women, would it be sexist? (I feel
like you're forced to say yes since you are committing to the idea being
sexist independent of the sex of the speaker.)

Is it possible for a man like Barney to be honestly and accurately analyzing
trends of the women in his life, given that he only ranks women shallowly?

Careful now. It's not necessarily sexist for Barney to _only care about
looks,_ or at least: since we all care about looks to some degree, it is
dangerous to imply that caring about looks is sexist. And if his analysis of
his desires is based on his decision to only try for attractiveness, how is
that analysis sexist instead of revealing the frailty of being so shallow?

So the comparison is basically that there are two orthogonal traits, one
negative and one positive. It is not "Drives, like women"; it is "Drives have
orthogonal traits, and evaluation of them therefore proceeds along the Barney
Analysis."

~~~
ajross
I understand the argument, but this isn't about logic. Context matters. Sexism
directed by men against women (well, "heteronormative" to use the jargon) is
"worse" than the reverse because it exacerbates an existing situation.

It's easy for a typical man in our society to shrug off a comment equating his
looks with his worth. It's much harder for a woman. "Should" it be? Of course
not, but that's sort of the point: let's try laying off things for a while
before demanding logical equality, OK?

~~~
Helianthus
A well put argument to establish a local subjectivity for practical effect.

The problem I have with it is that it is then used to marginalize _other_
local subjectivities like r/mensrights (which admittedly has its share of
ludicrous opinions, do _not_ admit you don't care you were circumcised) for
the purpose of serving the "most important" 'ism.

In reality there are a whole bunch of inequalities in a whole bunch of
different directions, and it doesn't make sense just to target the one that
_some_ people have decided is the most important. (In all honesty, for
instance, I think racial inequality is a much bigger problem than sexism in
our society now that women are becoming much better educated, whereas we still
have a lot of 'bad part[s] of town.')

In other words, we are not escaping heteronormative forms until we can
actually work with logical equality, and the quickest way through the forest
is the straightest. Why not just admit the problem is with beauty and our
valuation of it--and yes, men might be guilty of this more by percentage, but
that's not the source of the problem--instead of with gender?

~~~
StavrosK
I'd be grateful if you could explain the issue, because I really don't see
what the problem here is. I guess I don't understand what sexism is.

The way I see it, Barney only judges women by how hot/crazy they are (or he
judges them by more than that, but those are the two primary factors in his
judgement). Given that everyone judges everyone based on some traits, and
these traits have different weights attached to them, why is it sexist for
Barney to do that? He's just a shallow person, but not qualitatively different
than anyone else (only quantitatively).

Also, he is not saying "this is how you should judge women", only "this is how
I judge women". I would be fine with a woman saying that about a guy, or a
woman about a woman. It wouldn't be a woman I'd like to date, but I don't
consider it an attack on my gender as a whole.

------
albertzeyer
I also thought that about SSDs.

Then I stumbled upon this on the Apple store when configuring your disk
options: "Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard
drive. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability."

So, why do they say that? What SSD do they built in? Is that a particular
special SSD with enhanced durability? Even more enhanced than regular
harddisks (like they are claiming)?

~~~
fredoliveira
There is indeed no such thing. What they can always say is that since there
are no moving parts in an SSD drive, you don't have to fear screwing up your
data by moving your laptop around while working. In _that_ sense and in the
hands of a careless laptop user, it would indeed be more reliable.

What I describe above is just an excuse they can (and probably) use. The
reality is that it's just marketing text to up-sell you something. I bet it
works in many cases.

~~~
krolley
Surprising, though, that they use "enhanced durability" to upsell the hard
disk and not "increased performance".

------
ch0wn
I had an SSD from SuperTalent last year. It didn't even last 2 months before
massive filesystem corruptions started. Two weeks later it wasn't even
recognized anymore by the SATA controller.

~~~
whakojacko
...And I have an SSD that came installed with my Macbook Pro almost a year and
is still working without any hickups. Single data points aren't all that
valuable.

------
AlisdairO
I've often wondered about this stuff. MLC SSDs are good for 10000 writes per
250k (iirc?) block. When you think about using an SSD for virtual memory, even
with wear levelling, that's really not very much at all. Add in programs that
do lots of small file writes to logs and so on, and I can imagine losing a lot
of blocks fairly quickly - particularly because wear levelling will cause you
to lose all of the blocks in a relatively small time space, as opposed to
gradual failure.

I wonder if, as flash memory gets cheaper, we'll see SLC SSDs getting more
popular.

~~~
Symmetry
Its actually good for 10,000 erases per block, so depending on how your file
system works you could erase a block, then write to some of it, then rite to
another part of it, then write to it again filling it up. Write amplification
does occur for this reason and because the drive has to keep track of what it
has on itself, but its usually not more than a factor of 2.

~~~
wmf
In reality, every erase is followed by exactly one (amortized) program, so it
doesn't matter which one you track.

~~~
Symmetry
Really? That seems to inefficient though... I not a huge expert on commercial
SSDs, but when I've written my own flash drivers for embedded sensors I would
always make use of multiple writes per erase.

------
mrich
I have been using an enterprise-class Intel SSD (X25-E I think) for about one
year now in my workstation so help speeding up the build/linking process of a
large C++ project. This has made all the difference in development speed for
me. The disk gets punished a lot, lots of file copies and read/write
operations. To date I haven't had any problems (nor have I heard of any from
colleagues who are using them in the same way). I wouldn't care much about
data loss though since only temporary files are on there.

~~~
kaiwetzel
I have the same Intel SSD (32 GB only, though) and so far it works amazingly
well as a startup/system volume (Windows 7). I hope they'll offer the 128GB
version they promised as I'd definitely like to get one of those for a Linux-
box.

My experience with regular consumer-grade hard disks indicates that regular
backups of any data I want to keep is always a good idea. The X25-M mentioned
in the article are using MLCs and so might some of the other SSDs he has used
up. Another potential factor could be heat, malfunctioning hardware, etc. -
there is not enough data given to even guess what the problem could be.

If excessive writes are a problem, an idea have had is to protect a large MLC-
disk by using union fs to write only to a smaller SLC. No idea how much
overhead using union fs introduces by itself but to me it appears to be a good
way to use SLC/MLC drives, keep down costs, and don't rely too much on "magic"
MLC-firmware.

------
Luyt
I must be remarkable lucky. I have seven SSDs, four of them are installed in
computers I use often, and some more in datacenter servers. I have never had a
failure. And the SSD that's in my home unix server is already doing its job
for almost two years now.

I do make regular (image) backups from all my SSDs, so when one fails I can
quickly replace it and restore the image. Apart from that I keep all my
sourcecode and work-related stuff in a source code versioning control system
hosted in a datacenter.

~~~
albertzeyer
What SSDs are those?

~~~
Luyt
Intel X25M, in my MacMini this one:

    
    
      Capacity:	80.03 GB (80,026,361,856 bytes)
      Model:	INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC                    
      Revision:	2CV102HA
      Serial Number: CVPO0042012S080BGN
    

In my home unix server:

    
    
      smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE i386] 
    
      Model Family:     Intel X18-M/X25-M/X25-V G2 SSDs
      Device Model:     INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC
      Serial Number:    CVPO0054037B080BGN
      Firmware Version: 2CV102HD
      User Capacity:    80,026,361,856 bytes
    

In my datacenter server:

    
    
      Device Model:     INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC
      Serial Number:    CVPO951000ZJ080BGN
      Firmware Version: 2CV102HA
      User Capacity:    80,026,361,856 bytes

------
Klinky
One of the cool things about SSDs will be the huge amount of random I/O we can
throw at them without noticeable responsiveness slowdown. SSDs will probably
increase peoples' desire to backup because it will no longer be such a drain
on I/O responsiveness.

------
Artagra
My experience on SSDs, having used multiple drives myself and sold 100s of
drives to tech savvy customers:

\- Brand does matter - the failure rate on Intel drives is a lot lower than
other brands.

\- The system you put it in also makes a difference. For example, certain
generations of Macbook Pros are just not happy with certain SSDs. We've had
customer that had two or three failures with a certain brand / model /
chipset, and then changing to a different SSD they haven't had problems.

\- The failure rate for SSDs overall is higher than that for HDDs, but lower
than the failure rate for some other products (such as Graphics cards).

\- Every SSD we have sold went into a custom built system or was installed
afterwards into a laptop, so I don't buy the argument that problems are caused
because it's installed by an end user and not at the factory.

\- They are _blindingly_ fast. In my opinion, it's better for 90% of users to
put a new Intel SSD into their existing system, than it is to buy a new
system.

------
mooism2
Do we know what's killing them? Writes? Heat? Random loss of magic smoke?

~~~
fredoliveira
Short answer: writes, yes.

Long answer is long and I'm most certainly not an expert. It's just a
consequence of how NAND memory works. You can read more about this in the
links below (one is to a review of a particular ssd drive, but a couple of
sections explain how SSD works in great detail):

(1) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Memory_wear> (2)
<http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/3>

~~~
randallsquared
Someone else pointed out that other flash devices just become unwritable when
they "fail" due to writes, rather than suddenly becoming bricks. I'm skeptical
that this is the same thing.

------
orc
I've had an Intel X-25M for over a year now and it's been amazing performance
wise. In that same time span my 1TB data drive did die. The only problem I've
had with the SSD is that it about twice a month it will randomly freeze. The
hard drive light is solid on, and I have to just reset my machine. Not a big
deal though because the SSD starts up so fast.

~~~
sciurus
I have a similar anecdote; my 2TB western digital green drive died after a few
weeks, whereas my Intel X25-M G2 is still running fine after a year and a half

------
ZipCordManiac
For people who need reliability, SSDs are clearly not the wise choice. For
performance, they are, IF you are willing to replace them frequently (at GREAT
expense) and have downtime. Not to mention solid backups. The cons far
outweigh the pros for me. I like stable measured performance. My computer
isn't a hot rod, it's meant to be efficient.

~~~
sjs
Using a rotational HD does not excuse you from having solid backups. I've had
rotational HDs fail in just months, it's not the norm but it does happen.

------
qjz
No amount of hot is going to convince me to date someone with an STD. That
would be...well, crazy. I want my SSD to be at least as reliable as my system
memory (if not more). The article makes it sound like they are inherently
diseased. If that's the case, no thanks.

~~~
aristidb
It seems like it depends on the manufacturer. In this thread, somebody posted
a comparison: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505883>

Also note that mechanical hard drives fail a lot, too.

------
aristidb
Does it depend on manufacturer / generation? My Intel at least lives for a bit
longer already.

------
zandorg
I use 2.5" laptop hard drives not older than 2 years. They last about 6 years.

And if a hard drive starts to go, sometimes you hear it failing. I actually
backed up a 30gb hard drive where I had to wobble it up and down while being
backed up.

------
jkahn
2 x Intel SSDs here. No issues.

While the speed of these things can vary a lot, so does reliability - and that
won't show up in a benchmark. I noticed that a lot of the mentioned SSDs are
GSkill. Apparently those are cheap and unreliable.

------
Keyframe
Hmm this is bad. I was hoping SSDs would give us more speed in RAID0 setups
for film/video editing where we need sustained speeds of over 1.2GB/s
regularly (for one track 4k dpx only)... but if they fail a lot, it's too cost
prohibitive.

~~~
moe
"A lot" is a very relative term. Many people (including myself) have SSDs
running for over a year and they're ticking on just fine.

------
16s
I've had good luck with SSD drives (Intel and Kingston) for the last two
years. No failures. I use them in servers and laptops. I do rysnc them to
spindle based drives hourly, so if they do fail, I've got backup. Just my
experience.

~~~
jodrellblank
If they did fail, would you failover to the spindles (and would they keep up
with the workload?), or use them to recover to new SSDs?

------
kayoone
I have 3 different SSDs since early 2009 (64 & 128GB Supertalent Ultradrive ME
+ Intel X25-M 80GB) and the latter two are in heavy use everyday. They all
work fine until today, but this article worries me a bit ;)

------
thurn
I'd like some slightly less anecdotal evidence before I conclude that all SSDs
are doomed to an early death; we could be seeing some confirmation bias here.
Maybe Jeff and his friends just had a run of bad luck.

~~~
duck
Created a poll: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2506138>

(probably still won't be very useful, but at least it will be another data
point)

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zacharypinter
Seems like the entire post was a lead in to the affiliate link at the bottom.

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mrcharles
My first SSD died in three days. It is entertaining when an SSD dies, as you
simply get a "no OS found" type error from your bios. Checked the drive and it
appeared to be working, only was completely empty.

Swapped it out, been fine since (about a year and a half now). Also no
problems in my mac.

But both machines run regular backups so that should an SSD fail, it's just a
matter of imaging the new drive and replacing it.

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smackfu
This is really rather shocking to me. I always figured SSDs were as reliable
as SD cards or other Flash based items like MP3 players or phones. Where you
practically never see a failure due to the memory going bad.

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nuriaion
The alternative to SSD's are the conventional harddisk. But they also fail so
you need a full backup anyway. (Maybe not so often, but i had also several
harddisk which failed without much warning.)

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HelloBeautiful
5 SSDs here, got the oldest 2.5 years ago. No failures so far. I've run them
as system drives, DB storage and so on.

I'd think a reason for quick wear out may be swap memory. I've never put a
swap file/partition on mine.

~~~
portman
>> may be swap memory

That's very interesting. I've had a swap file on all of my SSD systems. What
makes you think that could be a culprit?

~~~
archivator
Continuous writing to the same area on the drive can probably exhaust the
spare cells and degrade performance. I don't know how the firmwares deal with
0 spare cells and further failures, though.

I have a swap partition on my SSD but I also have swappiness=0, so that it
only writes to disk if there's actual memory pressure.

~~~
colanderman
Modern SSDs use wear leveling to prevent this from happening. If you write to
the same logical location a thousand times, the SSD's wear-leveling algorithm
will write to a thousand different locations.

More info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling>

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urbanjunkie
Having a personal infrastructure chaos monkey is maybe not a bad thing (apart
from the expense etc).

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gcb
This has to be advertisement :)

went to the vertex 3 page on newegg. there was at least 5 reviews on the very
first page about it dying from 0 to 24h.

my cheap SSD on my 3yr old eeepc1000 is still kicking. it's now serving games
to my wii via a $5 enclosure that does NOT need external power. and the eeepc
has a bigger and faster one that's also working for 1yr+

...too bad asus used a mini e-pci interface that is as odd as records you
listened when you were 15.

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dholowiski
Shocker - Cutting edge new technology has high failure rate! But +1 for
mentioning Boob Job in a article about SSD drives.

