Analyzing Long-Term SSD Failure Rates

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. "

Uh, yes they are

[TheRaven64]

Did the poster even look at the chart he linked to? Those big lines that shoot up to the top after 1-3 years? They're the failure rates for hard disks. The ones near the bottom? They're the failure rates for SSDs. Now, some of the SSD figures are projected and look quite optimistic, but the number of hard disks failing after 3 years looks high than the number of SSDs failing after three years by all of the studies. For most workloads, the SSDs fail less often, and the SSD failures only exceed HD failures very early on in their lifetimes.

Re:Whaddayamean "long term"?

[h4rr4r]

The fix for this was released a long time ago, it is called proper backups. Instead of avoiding a superior product, trying using them and proper backups.

Re:Whaddayamean "long term"?

[TheLink]

The other failure mode is the "time warp" failure.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue [dslreports.com]

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.

The big problem with this failure mode would be if the user doesn't notice anything wrong till too late.

A 100% dead drive sucks, but if you do regular backups you lose 1 day of data.

A "time warp" failure that you don't notice could result in you sending out of date info in an important email. Or overwriting something important with invalid data and not noticing. The resulting damage could be far far worse than a dead drive.

In my experience "spinning rust" rarely fails 100% without warning (or abuse - e.g. you drop the drive ;) ). You can often salvage some stuff out (just hope it's the stuff you want ;) ). I've managed to use knoppix to salvage data from people's failed spinning disk drives.

In contrast these SSDs just go totally dead. Or really weird shit happens.

In both cases the manufacturer might get an RMA. But they're not the same. If OCZ drives are getting RMA'ed at higher rates than spinning drives, and their failure modes are 100% dead or "time warp" they are far worse than the stats show: http://news.softpedia.com/news/French-Website-Publishes-HDD-SSD-and-Motherboard-RMA-Statistics-196538.shtml [softpedia.com]