www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. I bought a set of three Crucial 128 GB SSDs in October 2009 for the original two members of the Stack Overflow team plus myself.
Portman Wills, friend of the company and generally awesome guy, has a far scarier tale to tell. He got infected with the SSD religion based on my original 2009 blog post, and he went all in. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying: * Super Talent 32 GB SSD, failed after 137 days * OCZ Vertex 1 250 GB SSD, failed after 512 days * GSkill 64 GB SSD, failed after 251 days * GSkill 64 GB SSD, failed after 276 days * Crucial 64 GB SSD, failed after 350 days * OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD, failed after 72 days * Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 15 days * Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 206 days You might think after this I'd be swearing off SSDs as unstable, unreliable technology.
Storage Review calls it the fastest SATA SSD we've seen. Beta firmware or not though, the Vertex 3 is a scorcher. We'll get into the details later in the review, but our numbers show it as clearly the fastest SATA SSD to hit our bench.
ocz-vertex-3 While that shouldn't be entirely surprising, it's not just faster like, "Woo, it edged out the prior generation SF-1200 SSDs, yeah!" It's faster like, "Holy @&#% that's fast," boasting 69% faster results in some of our real-world tests. Solid state hard drives are so freaking amazing performance wise, and the experience you will have with them is so transformative, that I don't even care if they fail every 12 months on average! I can't imagine using a computer without a SSD any more;
they need brand new 6 Gbps interfaces to fully strut their stuff. No CPU or memory upgrade can come close to touching that kind of real world performance increase.
Just like I date crazy girls fully expecting them to stab me: Always have that backup plan! My SSD simply holds my OS and apps, while my big mechanical drive (anything Western Digital Caviar Black) holds my docs. The projects that require serious I/O (like my localhost and 20 drupal sites) run off the the SSD but are, of course, version controlled through Git.
Bloomcb on May 2, 2011 2:36 AM Hey thanks Jeff for posting.. I have been thinking about SSD's for a while now, and wondering what their reliability is like.. given what you said, it certainly sounds fine to put up with the hassles for the enhanced speed. Considering most of what I do these days is either backed up locally via NAS, and Dropbox, and GIT for dev work, it really isn't like the bad old days (I remember buying an Amstrad PC-1512 - ok, I am originally from the UK, and that was the first real PC I could afford back then - it had a WD 10mb HD that fitted into a card slot.. So, my rather modest AMD based laptop should squeal with delight once I get an SSD for it...
David Sheardown on May 2, 2011 2:42 AM Do you know why they are failing? Have the manufacturers said why the reliability is so bad? It might be costly, but would you consider buying 2 and using RAID 1, so that if 1 fails, the other one will still be working?
Can Berk Gder on May 2, 2011 3:07 AM @Can Berk Gder, comparable speed? Sequential, sure, but nobody cares about that on SSDs except marketing weasels. What we care about is random 4K, which the Vertex can do 250MB/s incompressible, while HDDs struggle to do 1MB/s each (the high-density - 3TB - 7200 35" ones, smaller/older are far worse). You could stick two VelociRaptors, but notebooks don't supply 12V to the drives, so you don't give them power.
Poromenos on May 2, 2011 3:28 AM @Can Berk Gder, pardon me if I misunderstood, but what makes the Black array an instant and automatic backup, especially compared to the SSD array?
Apps 55753818692 823210138 54f697b0f292c60aa6e0030f691186d2 on May 2, 2011 3:43 AM @Mircea and @Poromenos Honestly, I've used neither (SSDs or a RAID setup). I'm not denying SSDs are fast, nor am I trying to bash them. I've also pointed out that this setup wasn't feasible for a laptop. The point I'm trying to make is, I think Jeff is looking at this from a very strange angle. When I look at the data, I say "SSDs are blazing fast but they fail like crazy." Jeff says "they fail like crazy, but I still love them, so let's buy more SSDs." I've been keeping an eye on SSD prices (which are much higher here than the US) for a long time now, but I think I'll wait a bit longer after reading this post. I just can't afford to replace a $1k drive every 8 months.
Alexandru Mooi on May 2, 2011 4:07 AM I agree with your comments, I fitted out a 6 year old ThinkPad X60 with a Vertex 2 last month and it now feels faster than my Quad Core i5 desktop w/ 6Gb of RAM. I wanted to ask if anyone knows much about the SMART monitoring on SSDs, and whether it can predict these failures. If they're failing for some other reason then I guess all bets are off, though.
Angus on May 2, 2011 4:20 AM @Can Berk Gder, RAID is for high availability and/or performance, it's not a backup. High availability allows your server to continue servicing while one of its disk is dead.
Slavo on May 2, 2011 4:24 AM Shouldn't all of those drives have been under warranty when they failed? I have a 64 GB Patriot SSD that's three years old and still going strong. It came with a ten year warranty which seems pretty incredible. I wonder what their replacement strategy is in nine years. Anyway, now I am paranoid and off to double check my backups.
William Furr on May 2, 2011 4:48 AM I'd be willing to bet the listed failure rates, while higher than platter HDDs, are not as high as this sample set would lead us to believe. I have two SSDs (Supertalent and Intel) with a total running time about 1150 days with no problems. That's not to say they won't fail tomorrow but I keep my backups upto date so I am not really afraid of the possibility.
Chris on May 2, 2011 5:04 AM I can confirm your experiences; I built a PC for my mother and couldn't understand what was wrong when it wouldn't start. Windows wouldn't boot, and neither would any of the safe modes. I was stumped because I thought "It's only been in here less than a year," it can't be the SSD. The worst part, as you mentioned, is that it was a total catastrophic failure like I've never seen with HDDs. I managed to recover the data using boot tools, but couldn't write to the drive, perform certain diagnostics, format or erase partitions. OCZ replaced it without hesitation (Vertex 40GB), but it taught me a lesson about the _real_ reliability of SSDs. Naturally, I have still used SSDs in my last two laptops! PS: The OWC 6gb/s SSDs are supposed to be the fastest, most reliable SSDs around I've heard.
com on May 2, 2011 5:14 AM Odd, the particular brand i'm using leaves a 3 year warranty and a life expectancy for a million hours. How is that even close to a good deal for the manufacturer? Naaaah, but sourcesafed and nothing you can't reinstall on the system drive.
Crypth on May 2, 2011 5:24 AM Is it just that the reliability of the new hotness isn't there yet? Is last years slower model more reliable, or can you pay more for more reliability?
Joel Hess on May 2, 2011 5:25 AM All this fuss - the future is here already and it isnt the current type of SSD. Keep your data & apps away from your computer whatever form your computer is and let your ISP & cloud provider have the hassle (check that you have a decent service level agreement) I know speed and network availability is occasionally an issue at the moment but that will improve.
I know what they're like, and for laptops I would use nothing else on account of the greater physical robustness. The fact of the matter is, outside a few corner cases, SSDs for desktop storage don't provide any particularly useful performance advantage. This will add up to entire minutes saved up over an entire year! I will lose more time to having to replace faulty disks, restore from backup, and redo work lost since the prior backup, than an SSD will ever save. I mean, sure, if I were compilin...
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